valuation ; and repo and securities - lending transactions, chiefly minimum haircuts. several other types of shadow banking entities, such as broker - dealers, investment funds and finance companies, have been categorized by their economic function within a principles - based regulatory framework. policy tool kits have been developed for each. implementation of these standards is ongoing globally and in canada and will be monitored and promoted by country and thematic peer reviews conducted in 2015. the next priority is to make further headway on the two areas i mentioned earlier — ending the threat of banks considered too big to fail and improving the safety of otc derivatives markets — that pose complex cross - border issues. ending too big to fail to address the problem of too big to fail, most clearly exemplified by the hugely disruptive failure of lehman brothers in september 2008, the fsb has taken three bold policy actions. the fsb reform objective for shadow banking is to transform it into resilient market - based finance. the international financial standard - setters include the basel committee on banking supervision ( bcbs ), the international organization of securities commissions ( iosco ), the committee on payments and market infrastructures ( cpmi ), and the international association of insurance supervisors ( iais ). basel iii “ is a comprehensive set of reform measures, developed by the basel committee on banking supervision, to strengthen the regulation, supervision and risk management of banks. ” see www. bis. org / bcbs / basel3. htm. the office of the superintendent of financial institutions ( osfi ) has obliged canadian banks to meet or exceed basel iii standards on an accelerated timetable. for example, since 2013, canadian banks have been required to hold at least 7 per cent of common equity tier 1 capital, compared with the basel requirement to hold 4. 5 per cent by 2015. osfi has also required full implementation of the liquidity coverage ratio ( lcr ) beginning in 2015, rather than the 2019 requirement under basel iii. bis central bankers ’ speeches first, the effectiveness of the supervision of large internationally active banks has been increased. second, approximately 30 of the most systemically important global banks — those so large that their failure would have an impact on the entire financial system — have been identified and will have to hold more capital to make them safer and discourage them from becoming even more systemically important. at this point, there are no canadian banks on this list. in canada, however, the office of the superintendent of financial institutions ( osfi

devaluation, and the snb ’ s activities during the second world war. peter bernholz of the university of basel is the author of the second chapter within this first part. he devoted himself to the period from 1945 to the early 1980s, including the return to convertibility, the bretton woods period, the transition to flexible exchange rates and initial experiences with an autonomous monetary policy. i am pleased to point out that the doors of the snb ’ s archives were opened unreservedly to these authors. the second part of the publication is more traditional. it is devoted to the last twenty - five years and deals with various aspects of the snb ’ s activities and its nature, ranging from monetary policy to the governance of the bank and including the new emphasis placed on financial stability, changing international relations, the renewed statutory framework in which we operate, and the adoption of a modern approach to managing our currency reserves. this second section, divided into eight chapters, was penned entirely by bank staff. we did not want a purely descriptive text. on the contrary, we asked the authors to adopt an analytical, critical approach, concentrating on key issues. in order to recognise the authors and their contribution to the book – and this is a departure from the previous commemorative works – they have been personally named at the beginning of each article. some forty in - house authors contributed to the work. for the third and last part of the book, which looks to the future, we took a step back. we called on the services of eight swiss and foreign economists, all specialists of global renown, asking them to discuss those issues of greatest concern to today ’ s central banks. we asked ernst baltensperger of the university of berne to provide a more academic assessment of the snb ’ s monetary policy over the last twenty - five years. we called upon marvin goodfriend of carnegie mellon university to give his views on the optimum inflation rate, frederic mishkin of columbia university to write about the policy of inflation targeting and to tell us to what extent it is truly a new phenomenon, and william white of the bank for international settlements in basel to address the difficult question of whether price stability is really enough. manfred neumann from the university of bonn was asked to provide an assessment of fixed and flexible exchange rate systems, peter kenen of princeton university to give us his opinion on the need for foreign exchange reserves in flexible exchange rate systems, martin hellwig from the max planck institute