One to watch is the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill from Vince Cable's BIS department - where intra-coalition tensions could appear clause by clause.
"The government has to understand that the costs of human spaceflight are far outweighed by the benefits - the benefits of inspiration and of exploration, " said Nick Spall, a BIS fellow and co-ordinator of the UK Human Spaceflight Campaign.
To put it bluntly, the "bridge-loan" (BIS originated or otherwise) envisioned by most G-7 partners, would represent a bridge to nowhere under current circumstances.
The establishment of a financial "safety net" (also through the BIS) for Soviet-owned subsidiary banks located in the West.
This has prompted calls for heightened surveillance, including a wider role for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Swiss-based central banks' central bank.
Every three years, when the BIS releases its new foreign-exchange market survey, the WSJ Dollar Index will be reweighted using the bank's latest trading volume figures, making it a dynamic index that evolves with the constantly changing market.
Recently, the BIS has been helping central banks with short-term liquidity problems, aiding institutions in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia with crucial bridging loans.
Of course, RIM could just add IMAP support directly to its phones so that this whiz-bang tech would work with any third-party email service and wouldn't have to go through BIS in the process, but that would be crazy talk, right?
ENGADGET: RIM's BIS 3.0 email features apparently leaked, finally does Gmail justice
BIS's work counts for least where it should matter most: in emerging-market economies such as those in Asia, where weak financial regulation turned currency turmoil into full-fledged economic crisis.
The scale of how much money American banks have at risk in the eurozone comes from a new BIS table of the actual and potential exposure of banks to most economies via cross-border loans and financial transactions.
Owned and controlled by the member central banks, the BIS provides them with data on capital flows and sets recommended regulatory standards such as capital-adequacy levels.
"One of the ways the governments of Asia know how much short-term debt they have is not from their own accounts, but from the BIS, " says Harvard University economist Jeffrey Sachs.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) argued in its recent annual report that huge growth in bank reserves was driving overnight-lending rates to zero, causing the market for unsecured overnight lending to atrophy.
It's hard to fathom that it's taken this long, but hey, we'll take it -- unfortunately, it's up to each carrier to decide when they're going to deploy BIS upgrades, so your mileage may vary on the wait time.
ENGADGET: RIM's BIS 3.0 email features apparently leaked, finally does Gmail justice
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