Banking: Financial Stability

My Lords, I cannot conceive that anyone speaking from the Dispatch Box on these issues will not have the international perspective very much in mind during questions and debates in the House. As my noble friend indicated, this is a worldwide crisis. We are all too well aware that, inevitably, there have been individual responses in various countries but, underpinning it all, are problems which are common across the international system. We know that a great deal of the origins of the crisis obtained not in the United Kingdom but in the United States. This has been the burden of the representation on the reform of international finance that the Prime Minister has been conveying for more than a decade. At last he has got listening ears.