message received and understood − speech by dave ramsden given remotely at a conference by the lietuvos bankas and the bank for international settlements ( bis ) on the “ future of central banking ” published on 29 september 2022 speech introduction thank you very much for the invitation to join this panel today and i am very sorry i can ’ t be with you in vilnius. real - time market developments kept me here in london, but i ’ m grateful to the organisers from the central bank of lithuania and from the bis for allowing me to contribute virtually to the bank ’ s 100th birthday conference. i really welcome the focus of this panel on data since having access to fast, accurate, appropriately structured data is critical in equipping central banks with the knowledge they need to function in order to meet their objectives. the bank of england ’ s mission to deliver monetary and financial stability is a broad and deep one. we need a similarly broad pool of data of varying depths to fulfil our mission. in 15 minutes i cannot hope to do justice to the variety of data we need to get a clear picture of the economy, the financial system as a whole and the firms we regulate in order to frame action. last year the bank and pra published our data strategy, joint with the fsa, setting out how we will transform our collection and use of data to fulfil our responsibilities as a supervisor and regulator [ 1 ]. in my time today i will focus on my bank responsibilities for payments and give a real - life example of why having real - time data matters and also point to how we could make payments data even more useful through the message that communicates the data. i will conclude with a brief recap on uk financial market developments this week and highlight the use we are making of real - time data to respond to those developments to meet our objective for financial stability. use of real - time payments data the covid - 19 pandemic continues to impact on us in many ways and to change how we do things. in the context of today ’ s panel the pandemic acted as a catalyst for extending use of the bank ’ s payments data. right from its start in march 2020 we knew that the pandemic and the necessary response to it would have very serious but also very different impacts on different sectors of the economy. but it was much less easy to be confident of the scale of those differential impacts and over what time frame. extracting a signal from an understand

and to decide on the operational capabilities and instruments which that role requires. holding meetings and issuing communiques is not enough. as a central banker, i naturally focus more on the imf, and i shall do that today. but the lessons are general. it is worth noting the scale of the challenge. the specific commitments made at the end of the second world war are no longer relevant. the shared experience of the great depression, protectionism and two world wars has faded. and the majority of current nation states were not “ present at the creation ”. the world has certainly changed since 1945, and it is the nature of those changes which underpins the case for reform. the world today is different from that at the creation of the post - war settlement in two important respects. first, despite the increasing integration of the world economy, which might appear to reduce the effect of national policies, the nation state has in fact flourished since 1945. the collapse of ideology and empire, and the triumph of the ideas of a liberal market economy, have been accompanied by an extraordinary expansion in the number of countries in the world. in 1946 there were fewer than 80 countries. now there are 192 members of the un. much of that increase represents the division of empires, such as the former soviet union, into new states, as well as growing ethnic separation. most of these new countries were not “ present at the creation ” and see no reason why they should acquiesce in governance arrangements made in their absence. and the economic weight of countries has changed greatly since the post - war international institutions were set up. in 1950, asian countries accounted for a sixth of world gdp measured at purchasing power parity. now they account for more than a third. second, the world economy is very different today than when the imf, the world bank, and the other international economic institutions were set up. at the end of the second world war, the international monetary system was built around fixed exchange rates and controls on capital flows. the rules of the game were simple. countries were supposed to balance their current account. when “ imbalances ” arose, they were under an obligation to correct them. in practice, however, the obligations on creditor and debtor countries did not prove to be symmetric. over time the advantages of capital flows, particularly in the private sector, became apparent, and in a world without capital controls, it is possible to maintain independent monetary policies only by allowing exchange rates to float.