mr. george gives a central banker ’ s response to the asian crisis speech by the governor of the bank of england, mr. e. a. j. george, at the foreign and colonial emerging markets conference, in london, on 28 / 5 / 98. thank you, mr chairman. i ’ m delighted to participate in this emerging markets conference, sharing the platform with such distinguished company. i am particularly pleased to be joined in this session by guillermo ortiz - my colleague from the bank of mexico. the particular examination question which you set me is : “ how did an oecd central banker respond to the asian crisis? ”. i have to confess that it ’ s a somewhat embarrassing question. if i ’ m brutally honest i have to acknowledge that i didn ’ t see it coming ; i played a modest role in helping to contain its immediate impact on global financial stability ; and i ’ m still struggling to understand its implications, in terms both of its economic after - effects, and of the lessons we must all learn to reduce the risks in the future. i would only plead in mitigation, your honour, that i was by no means alone in all of that ; and i beg leave to join in my defence all my central banking colleagues, governments and finance ministry officials, in asia and elsewhere, the international financial institutions, and the world ’ s financial markets. the storm last year in asia struck essentially the asean four - thailand, the philippines, malaysia and indonesia - spreading subsequently to south korea and intermittently battering hong kong and elsewhere. it is still not wholly clear - to me at least - quite why the storm struck suddenly when it did. most crises of this sort have their origins in some evident macro - economic policy failure. at least in hindsight there are usually fairly clear tell - tale signs of expanding fiscal deficits and / or lax monetary policies, classically accompanied by evidence of imbalance in the form of accelerating inflation or a rapidly deteriorating balance of payments. there were such signs, perhaps most notably in thailand ; but they were not for the most part particularly pronounced in asia. some of you perhaps understand better than i do why the initial infection proved to be so contagious. it was after all your money! in fact through the first half of the 1990 ’ s, and in some cases for much longer, the countries in question had been remarkably successful. they attracted, by their very success, huge inflows of capital from the rest of the

andrew bailey : taking our second chance to make mmfs more resilient speech by mr andrew bailey, governor of the bank of england, at the international swaps and derivatives association ( isda ) 35th annual general meeting, 12 may 2021. * * * introduction thank you for inviting me to speak today. i want to start by thanking isda for the important work you do, and in recent times particularly scott o ’ malia and his colleagues for working with central banks and regulators to manage the transition away from libor. your support on this complex transition has been hugely important. you may be relieved to hear that i am not going to talk about libor today. i did speak on the subject yesterday, it ’ s on the bank of england ’ s website if you are interested ( bailey, 2021 ). instead, i am going to speak about another important part of our current work and a priority for the global financial stability board ( fsb ), namely money market funds ( mmfs ). the fsb analysed last march ’ s so - called “ dash for cash ” in their holistic review published at the end of last year, highlighting a number of vulnerabilities in non - bank finance and setting out some considerations for reforms required to tackle the issues we saw in that episode ( fsb, 2020 ). mmfs were one of the issues at the top of that list. mmfs also played a role in amplifying the stress we saw during the global financial crisis, so this is the second time they have proven not to be sufficiently resilient. i plan, therefore, to set out my views today on the reforms required to solve these issues. we are committed to working with others internationally, through the fsb, to avoid history repeating itself yet again. background to the issues posed by mmfs in talking about money market funds, it is important to put them into a wider context. several aspects of that context are important, including : their historical origins, the role they played in amplifying stresses in the global financial crisis, the direction of reforms following that episode, and the position of the funds relative to both banks and the broader investment fund landscape. to start, briefly, with some history. in the us, money market funds emerged in the 1970s when regulation capped the interest that banks were allowed to pay on deposits at a level below money market yields. money market funds were set up to mimic bank deposits by maintaining a stable value of