Bernanke presented the following key points:

• To help regulators better anticipate and prepare for threats to financial stability, legislatures in both the United States and other developed economies have instructed central banks and regulatory agencies to adopt what has been called a macro-prudential approach to supervision and regulation – that is, an approach that supplements traditional supervision and regulation of individual firms or markets with explicit consideration of threats to the stability of the financial system as a whole.

• A second major objective of financial reform is to mitigate the threats to financial stability posed by the too-big-to-fail problem. Here the Dodd-Frank Act takes a two-pronged approach. The first prong empowers the Federal Reserve to reduce a SIFI’s probability of failure through tougher prudential regulation and supervision, including enhanced risk-based capital and leverage requirements, liquidity requirements, single-counterparty credit limits, stress testing, an early remediation regime, and activities restrictions.

Full speech