financial health of the irish economy, can rise as a result of developments from outside the economy. currently, there are several international developments that have implications for the stability of the irish economy and financial system. the most important concerns are the large global imbalances, commodity price pressures and expectations of monetary tightening globally. conclusion let me conclude this short address by stating what we hope to achieve by publishing our annual financial stability report. first, we hope to identify potential risks in the irish financial system and second we will endeavour to raise the level of awareness of these risks by all economic agents, including households and businesses. finally, we propose to continue our ongoing dialogue with the banks in the context of the findings of the report with the objective of arriving at a common understanding of any developments that might suggest a risk to financial stability.

. rather, each paper could be posted as soon as it was ready. so that is how the jbf3e is now published. as soon as an article has been peer reviewed, revised, copy edited and checked, it is published online. the journal is published in june and december. the june 2010 issues may be accessed now at www. ccmf - uwi. org, the centre ’ s website. as soon as the next six to eight papers are published, the december 2010 issue will be closed, and the next paper published after that will be designated for the june 2011 issue. in this way, electronic publishing frees you from the threat of being held hostage to the last laggard writer or editor. once we uncovered this reality we were able to extend the same principle to other publications, such as a book that is currently being prepared on the financial sectors of the caribbean countries. each central bank that contributes to ccmf ’ s activities is contributing a chapter. not all the chapters are ready, but those that are have already been posted to the website, and chapters are added as they are finalised. the same considerations apply even more importantly to data. when statistics are presented in printed form, as for example in the central bank ’ s annual statistical digest, publication has to await the data that are available with the longest delay. that meant that the asd with 2008 data appeared only in 2010. the central bank intends to get around this problem by moving to electronic publishing of data, which allows different sectoral statistics to be published as soon as they are ready. another thing we discovered at ccmf was that, even after we ’ d published a wealth of useful material to our website, people weren ’ t aware of it. people would call or write us for information which they could readily access on the site. a colleague of mine, a professor at uwi, sent a graduate student to the centre in the hope of finding a copy of a paper he had presented at a conference organised by the centre some years earlier. he was unaware that the paper was available electronically on the website. that made us realize that we needed a newsletter, to keep users and potential users up to date, and the ccmf ’ s monthly newsletter was started. it features probably the most convenient summary of caribbean regional business and economic news each month. my point here is that we at ccmf were not the first to discover the fact that electronic publishing liberates publishers