Time for global securities regulators to step up to the plate (2)

The second pillar of IOSCO's work is to build a stronger forward-looking capability to identify emerging systemic risks much earlier. This requires collecting and filtering the collective wisdom of securities regulators, leading market professionals and academics from all over the world. And “prioritizing” work to focus on the main collective action problems to answer the following type of questions:

- Do we now fully understand the interconnectivity of financial markets and are we dealing effectively with concentration of risks?

- Should we be concerned about the rapid, centrifugal fragmentation of financial intermediation, or not?

- Are new, innovative, high speed ways of trading good for financial market development?

- What are the right policies to develop market based financing for SME′s the world over?

- Are corporate governance regimes applicable to public companies robust enough?

- How can resolution regimes deal with major cross-border conflicts of law?

- Are market surveillance and enforcement regimes sufficiently deterrent and convergent to avoid global regulatory arbitrage?

The Beijing Conference will debate these issues and decide on IOSCO's future leadership for a new streamlined Board structure. It will begin also constructing a third pillar - an IOSCO Foundation - to strengthen education and training, technical assistance and research. Lastly, IOSCO's Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding – a unique mechanism whereby IOSCO′s members exchange information for enforcement purposes which is due to be fully implemented by 1 January 2013 - will be thoroughly examined. The results, so far, are encouraging.

It is apposite that this years` IOSCO Annual conference takes place in China. In a country whose stock markets have grown tenfold over the last decade to become the second biggest group in the world and where continued strong growth is likely in the years ahead.

(The author is the Secretary General of IOSCO)