Countries need to establish rigorous supervisory regimes, foster a sound credit culture in banks, and apply international standards of accounting, disclosure, and loan classification and provisioning. Complicated and deeply entrenched ties between the state, banks and industry will have to be untangled. In Indonesia the priority is a still more fundamental one: to resolve the political and security crisis, reestablish an effective government, and restore confidence. Only then will basic preconditions exist to begin to tackle Indonesia's economic problems, which in themselves are daunting enough, and will take considerable time to overcome. While Asia struggles with its problems, the rest of the world has moved on, especially the OECD countries. Their financial industries are being rapidly transformed, and progressively although not fully integrated with one another. This has presented a special challenge to Singapore, a major financial centre in the midst of a troubled region. We cannot totally insulate ourselves from the problems of our neighbours. Yet we have to keep up with developments in other financial centres, to preserve and strengthen our position. Our regulatory environment must stay in line with best practices elsewhere,  BIS Review 45/2001  1  and our domestic financial institutions must gear up to cope with competition from formidable foreign players. Otherwise, we risk being sidelined. Fortunately, when the Asia crisis struck our financial system was basically sound, so the banks and other financial institutions emerged relatively unscathed from the storm. This gave us the flexibility to press on with reforms and liberalisation.

In my current role, as Executive Director for Markets at the Bank of England, Chair of the London Foreign Exchange Joint Standing Committee, and a member of the Global FX Committee, I have a responsibility to foster strong, efficient and fair foreign exchange markets in sterling and other currency pairs. But I was also in at the birth of the Code itself, because in 2014-15 I led the team that produced the Fair and Effective Markets Review, which recommended amongst other things that the ‘Global Preamble’ produced by national FX committees in March 2015 should be expanded into a full-blown Global Code, sweeping away the various national texts that preceded it, and setting a new standard for trading practices and behaviours in a market that urgently needed reform. Two years later, in May 2017, the Global Code was launched, setting out a common set of guidelines for good practice in the FX market. The Code contains 55 principles covering ethics, governance, execution 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  2  and transparency, information sharing, risk management, confirmation and settlement; and it tackles aspects of current and future market development, including electronic trading, algorithmic trading and prime brokerage. The drafting process was a truly global effort, taking two years and involving central banks and market participants, including buy-side, sell-side and end-users, from 16 jurisdictions around the world. Many of you, or your institutions, played a vital role in that process. Takeup of the Code, which is voluntary, has grown rapidly.