Goal: A Financial Safety Net
The relatively narrow role the BIS plays today does not reflect its ambitions or historical role.
A "well-designed financial safety net, supported by strong prudential regulation and supervision, effective laws that are enforced, and sound accounting and disclosure regimes," are among the Bank's goals. In fact they have been in its mandate since its founding in 1930 as a means to enforce the Treaty of Versailles.
The BIS has historically had less power to enforce this "safety net" than it deems necessary. Recent head Andrew Crockett has bemoaned its inability to "hardwire the credit culture," despite many specific attempts to address specific concerns such as the growth of Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs), Highly Leveraged Institutions (HLIs), Large and Complex Financial Institutions (LCFIs), deposit insurance and especially the spread of money laundering and accounting scandals.
Read more about this topic: Bank For International Settlements
Famous quotes containing the words financial, safety and/or net:
“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“To emancipate [the slaves] entirely throughout the Union cannot, I conceive, be thought of, consistently with the safety of the country.”
—Frances Trollope (1780–1863)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)