Research at the University of Leicester found that an increase in the number of female traders in a market reduces the occurrence of crashes.6 Firms with monocultures suffer a quarter more governance-related issues than their peers, according to the FCA.7 And the IMF found that banks with higher shares of women leaders had higher capital buffers, lower nonperforming loans, and higher ‘distance to distress’. 8  Figure 3: Likelihood of financial performance above national industry median (%)  Source: ‘Delivering through diversity’, McKinsey, January 2018. 6  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88c1/6ee1ff277cd71340dd15980537174658016f.pdf https://www.fca.org.uk/news/speeches/women-finance-keeping-pressure-progress 8 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2018/09/17/women-in-finance-a-case-for-closing-gaps-45136 7  4  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  4  There are several reasons for these findings:   First, recruiting a more diverse team means you are fishing in a bigger talent pool – so you should be able to choose a better team.   Second, more diverse teams make better decisions, because they have more ways to approach problems, and are better at self-challenge; and    Third, diversity improves a firm’s connection to, and empathy with its customers. Within a trading environment, research suggests that adding more women to trading teams tends to improve risk management, increase average returns, reduce the incidence of ‘over trading’ (or trading for the sake of it), and improve a team’s capacity to monitor for, admit to, and learn from past mistakes. But if diversity is so great, why has it taken so long for FX and other markets to begin to embrace it? We can only speculate.

But still, being for the euro is simply a total political non seller. If I were to summarise the arguments against joining, be it on the side of the general public or professionals, they would be roughly threefold: A. The first one is sentimental rather than economic. We have been living with our Czech koruna, or crown, for quite some time and our country has a long history of monetary stability and stabilisation. By the way, we have had the same name for our currency ever since 1892, from the times of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (the crown is a monarchist name – what a paradox in our republic) and there has never been any reason to rename it. The old adage says: If it ain’t broke, why fix it? If you have low and stable inflation on your own, you don’t need any credibility for your currency from abroad. B. The second argument is more economic. Money matters. And monetary stabilisation matters. If you have shocks in the economy, something has to move to offset the shock. Something has to be flexible. It is easier to accommodate shocks through flexible interest rates or a flexible exchange rate than through wages, unemployment or budget expenditure. We discussed yesterday how hard it can be if you don’t have monetary policy to adjust to shocks. This is a classical argument of monetary economics for the active role of elastic money when you don’t have flexible prices or wages. Simple as that.