), pp. 1449 - 75 or s. morris and h. s. shin, “ social value of public information ”, american economic review, 2002, 92 ( 5 ), pp. 1521 - 1534. policies. easy access to information also allows investors to better differentiate across economies, borrowers and companies. ultimately, this helps to lessen herding behaviour and contagion when market volatility increases. this is why transparency is so crucial. and in recent years, a lot of progress has been made to enhance transparency and to facilitate access to information as well as its dissemination to market participants. i give you one example. ten years ago, the nature of economic and financial data and the way they were reported varied significantly across countries. even simple concepts, such as debt, could be understood very differently around the world. this severely constrained our ability to compare financial vulnerability across countries. but thanks to work carried out at the imf, the special standards for dissemination of economic and financial data have become a widely recognised benchmark to which a large and increasing number of countries adhere. of course, there are still areas where more work needs to be done. one of them, for instance, is the reporting to the imf on the currency composition of countries ’ foreign exchange reserves. but overall, things are moving in the right direction. adopting good practices is a second principle which should continue to guide our efforts in reforming the governance of the world economy in macroeconomic and financial matters. here again, there have been a number of achievements. a large array of standards and codes for macroeconomic and data transparency, banking supervision, corporate governance, accounting, and payment and settlement systems have been subject to international agreements. such standards bring together what is widely considered as good practice or guidelines in a particular domain. they enhance domestic and international stability. in this respect, the imf and the financial stability forum – the only forum for cooperation among national and international entities in charge of supervision – have singled out 12 of these standards as being of particular importance for a sound and stable economic and financial system. but the work of the international community has gone beyond standard - setting. it now also focuses on implementation. progress has been made towards publicly examining countries ’ compliance with standards and codes. and there is one important lesson that we can draw from this experience. the international community does not always need to rely on rules and unilateral enforcement to make progress on certain fronts. goodwill and, at times

thomas jordan : swiss national bank monetary policy in light of financial market disruptions introductory remarks by mr thomas jordan, member of the governing board of the swiss national bank, at the end - of - year media news conference, zurich, 11 december 2008. * * * situation in the financial markets looking at the financial markets, we currently find ourselves in a historically unprecedented situation. the financial crisis has escalated dramatically since september. in the course of the past three months, it has taken hold in almost every market segment around the globe. at the time of the last news conference in june, we had already experienced three waves of money market turbulence ; now, a fourth wave has eclipsed all others ( cf. chart 1 ). 1 the situation in the money markets has calmed somewhat since november. this is due in part to the measures taken by central banks and governments, in particular the generous amounts of liquidity injected into the system, the recapitalisation of banks, the provision of state guarantees for bank liabilities and the transfer of risk positions. after unsecured money markets had all but frozen in the autumn, central banks increasingly found themselves acting as lender of first resort, in other words, they were becoming the primary supplier of liquidity to the financial system. to this end, new monetary policy instruments and facilities were introduced, and the liquidity supply was expanded significantly. despite the calming in the money markets, the situation in the stock and credit markets continued to worsen as a result of the rapid deterioration in economic conditions. i would like to illustrate the unique nature of the current situation with a comparison of the dow jones industrial average from five stock market crises ( cf. chart 2 ). 2 price declines this time round are significantly steeper than those in 2000 and 1973 and not at all comparable with 1987, when the stock markets recovered very quickly. measured by the extent of the dow jones losses, the current crisis can only be compared to that of 1929. although the financial losses suffered this time have probably already far exceeded those of 1929. the reason for this is the considerably higher market capitalisation of the stock markets, as measured by gross domestic product ( gdp ). what is more, the losses suffered today are not merely limited to the stock markets, they also affect practically every other type of asset, of which there are significantly more nowadays than back then. prices have plummeted across the board, from corporate bonds to structured products, from raw materials and emerging market currencies to