Central bankers glancing at the cover of this issue may immediately find themselves thinking: "Well, we have always been concerned with it," and of course that is the case. The Federal Reserve was founded in 1914 to stabilise the American financial system after a succession of crises. The great pioneers in the theory of central banking, such as Henry Thornton and Walter Bagehot, saw the central bank's provision of liquidity to the markets at times of distress as central to its function. The