First, should we not have a Trade Repository covering securities lending – a cash market – including the way collateral is employed? We surely need to do something to lift the veil on this vital financing market and, probably, on the collateral swap market more generally. Second, we need to think carefully about the purposes for which the information in TRs is collected, and thus how it is stored. As well as helping to identify market abuse, which of course is a core mission of securities regulators, we need to use the information to track more generally what is going on in markets to help us spot incipient, often slow-moving threats to stability. And even though individual Trade Repositories are being set up to handle specific markets (credit-default swaps, interest-rate swaps etc), it needs to be possible to see the pattern of risk and flows across markets and products. Recognising that,  16  Paris in 1974, Kuala Lumpur in 1983 and, most dramatically, the Hong Kong futures clearing house in 1987. 17  Paragraph 3.21, Report of the Hong Kong Securities Review Committee, 1988. I should disclose that I was an Advisor to the SRC and drafted much of the text submitted to the committee. 8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the FSB has called for the relevant authorities, liaising with the BIS Committee of the Global Financial System, to set requirements for reporting of transactions to trade repositories that meet the needs of financial stability analysis.18 This work needs a higher profile.

The implementation of quick and concrete measures, which guarantee the long-term stability of public debt, seems that shall condition considerably the future development. World financial markets have reacted tensely against these developments, being characterised by a high volatility and an increase of risk primes throughout the instruments variety, markets and financial agents. Turning to the domestic economy, the latest qualitative and quantitative indicators show a slow performance of economy in the early months of 2010. The deceleration of domestic demand is compensated by a positive and growing performance of the Albanian exports. The domestic inflationary pressures were low and the consumer price inflation declining. Monetary markets revealed more calm, characterised by a dropping trend of interest rates, liquidity situation improvement of the banking system and a more stable performance of the exchange rate. However, lending to economy continues to maintain low growth paces. Indirect and prior estimates suggest that the paces of private consumption have been controlled, conditioned by restricted sources of its financing and by the higher tendency of consumers regarding savings. The low level of capacities utilisation in economy, the low paces of loan for investments and the fall of capital and intermediate goods import, signal a contraction of private investments even during the first three months of this year. The demand for monetary assets of private sector continues to be low, thus reflecting a deceleration of the economic activity. The annual pace of lending growth, excluding the exchange rate effect, for this sector slowed down onwards, at 4.8 percent in March.