The devastating impact of the global financial crisis created a consensus that pre-crisis financial regulation didn’t take the “big picture” of the system as a whole sufficiently into account and, as a result, supervisors in many markets “missed the forest for the trees.” In other words, they did not take into account the macro-prudential aspects of regulation, which has now become the focus of many authorities. Macro-prudential policies were the focus of discussions in Shanghai earlier this week, where The Peoples’ Bank of China hosted conference titled Macro-Prudential Policies: Asian Perspectives, that brought together central bankers and senior financial officials around the world. At the conference, there was wide agreement that the first step in designing macro-prudential policies ought to be a convergence of views regarding the objectives of such policies.