external driving forces guiding our country toward the european family. 3. bank of albania albania had its first central bank institution in 1913. it was founded as an outcome of the agreement of the ismail qemali government with some representatives of an austrianhungarian bank group and of the banca commerciale italiana. the institution did not live long due to the outbreak of the first world war and it was not before the year 1925 that the bank ’ s activity started under the name of the national bank of albania. during the years 1944 - 1992, it was named state bank of albania, which at that time exercised both the functions of a central bank and those of a commercial one and only after 1992 the two - tier system is established and bank of albania starts performing the functions of a modern central bank. based on a parliamentary law it has the attribute of the monetary and supervisory authority of the country. the primary objective of the bank of albania is to achieve and maintain price stability. it seems that this way bank of albania has solved the dilemma of choosing the key objective of monetary policy in favor of price stability will contribute to sustainable growth and to generate equilibrium in the labor market over long term period. from the historic prospective, since the early stages of transition we adopted a monetary targeting regime. the choice was made believing in the friedman ’ s postulate that inflation is wherever and always a monetary phenomenon. direct control on money growth, credit growth and interest rates were the operational tools of monetary policy aiming at the control of money supply, which served as the intermediate objective. a free floating regime of exchange rate was chosen to match the monetary targets. other forms of exchange rate regimes were never discussed due to lack of adequate foreign exchange reserves and therefore the incapability to support a fixed rate of domestic currency. in addition the floating regime was chosen as an automatic stabilizer of the fast growing current deficits. therefore the choice between different alternatives of stabilization program was conditioned ( and easy ). in general this regime has resulted successful and still continues to be the operating framework of the monetary policy. i believe that its success was conditioned by low financial intermediation and under developed financial markets. the presumed stable relationship between money and transactions and permitted for confident monetary programming based on the fisher ’ s equation of exchange. however, as the efficiency and speed of financial intermediation increased and financial innovation set in motion, this policy setup become obsolete. bank of albania moved away from direct control on money in favor of indirect control of money

muhammad bin ibrahim : perspectives and issues in navigating the development of the malaysian financial market remarks by mr muhammad bin ibrahim, governor of the central bank of malaysia ( bank negara malaysia ), at the asean risk conference 2017 “ perspectives and issues in navigating the development of the malaysian financial market ”, kuala lumpur, 24 may 2017. * * * thank you ladies and gentlemen. two years ago, i spoke at this very conference on asean integration. two years on, i am pleased to share that we have achieved substantial progress on this front. among others, the asean banking integration framework and the bilateral frameworks to settle trade in local currencies are two significant milestones for financial integration. today, i intend to speak on a few issues relating to asean integration and outline the latest developments and challenges in the domestic financial market. for decades, globalisation has been the cornerstone of global economic development. globalisation was a way to bring the countries of the world together to gradually flatten the intercountry disparities in income, wealth and overall standard of living, in hope that the motivation for war and conflict among countries would gradually reduce as disparities narrowed. globalisation expanded trade and the free flow of capital, allowing countries to reap the benefits of comparative advantage while facilitating the growth of new sources of income and the transfer of knowledge and technologies. truth be told, globalisation bore fruits that lead to greater economic growth, prosperity and wealth. however, in the dogmatic pursuit of inter - country convergence, intra - country disparities have become increasingly apparent. as nations across the globe were brought closer together, citizens within each nation were pulled further apart, separated by the rising inequality, the declining share of labour income versus capital, and the displacement of workers. the unfettered market openness by advanced economies had caused unintended consequences that have ignited the rise to populism, inward - looking tendencies and potentially protectionist policies. if left to run its course, this will be a setback to global prosperity. in asean, we are no stranger to this perspective. our own experience is highly relevant. we learnt from the asian financial crisis, that pushing countries to adopt policies when readiness is suspect is a design for failure. without the necessary preconditions of sound institutional frameworks, adequate safeguards and capacity and robust domestic financial markets, premature financial liberalisation will expose the economy to waves of destabilising short - term speculative flows. when these