Europe has been rebuilt and regained its prosperity. The former Warsaw Pact nations are undergoing an historic economic and political transformation. Japan is now the world's second-largest economy. Over the past decade, Asia and Latin America have become, respectively, the fastest and second-fastest growing regions of the world. Trade barriers have begun to fall with the recognition that growth and protectionism are incompatible.
Economic health is now the global binding agent.
Ensuring that that bond holds is critical to all our interests and to the next chapters in global history. However, we face new challenges. To be certain that the gains of the past 50 years are not at least in part squandered, we must do everything possible to equip the international financial institutions to meet those challenges, and to address other areas such as trade market regulation that are critical to meeting those challenges. I want to examine the challenges the world faces, and discuss what I believe is necessary for the future. The challenges are first, to develop effective multilateral mechanisms to deal with the problems that may arise from the vast increase in the speed and size of the international financial markets, and to minimize systemic risk from those markets.