During most of the past decade, the Financial Stability Forum has laboured in obscurity. For while the group has long been a crucial place for central bankers and supervisors to meet, these discussions have been so discreet they were barely known in the wider world.

No longer. Yesterday the G20 issued a communiqué that renamed the FSF the "Financial Stability Board", with an elevated mandate to monitor global financial stability and promoting med-ium-term reform, alongside the International Monetary Fund. The G20 also confirmed an earlier announcement that the FSB would expand its membership to include representatives from all the G20 nations for the first time - in effect turning the group into the nearest thing the world has to a prototype of a an overarching global financial regulatory group.