News release: “One of the lessons of the global financial crisis which started in August 2007 is the crucial importance for policy makers and supervisors of having access to a wide range of reliable, timely and detailed financial statistics. The BIS has long been playing a pioneering role in collecting and providing, under the auspices of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), financial statistics which have been actively used to better understand the crisis and international financial trends and linkages. To take stock of how BIS international financial statistics have helped academic and central bank researchers to improve our understanding of global financial stability issues, the CGFS sponsored a second workshop on “Research on global financial stability: the use of BIS international financial statistics“. The event was held in December 2008 in Basel and this volume contains papers presented at the workshop.”