Sharon Donnery: Maintaining stability in the face of volatility – financial regulation in a rapidly changing world
Remarks by Ms Sharon Donnery, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, at The Compliance Institute annual conference, Dublin, 14 November 2023.
The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.
Good morning, and many thanks to the Compliance Institute for inviting me here to speak at their annual conference. Given the speakers you will hear from and the topics on the agenda, it promises to be a very interesting day.
For my own remarks, I thought I would set the scene for the day and outline a few thoughts about the challenging macro-economic environment we have been living through, the risks on the horizon in the context of our rapidly changing financial sector, and what all these challenges mean for regulators and compliance professionals.
Challenge and change – the economy and the financial sector
It is safe to say we are living through times of huge uncertainty, made all the more challenging by the scale and speed at which the world is changing.
The last two decades have seen significant shifts in the Global and European Economy.
We have gone from the "great moderation" to the "great recession". From the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis to the UK leaving the EU. From a global pandemic to the war in Ukraine, and now a burgeoning war in the Middle East.
This exceptional series of shocks, was met with an exceptional set of policy responses.
These varied across countries but included bank bailouts and record deficits followed by austerity and fiscal retrenchment; then negative interest rates and quantitative easing before the emergency fiscal and monetary policy response to the pandemic.