Mr. Klaus Regling:

Ireland and the euro area as a whole have already done a lot by deciding on new policy co-ordination mechanisms. We have now - I mentioned it earlier - the so-called excessive imbalance procedures. This looks at macroeconomic imbalances that can lead to a crisis like excessive divergence in competitiveness, current account imbalances and credit bubbles. All this is now done in a systematic way. It did not exist before the crisis. We always had a Stability and Growth Pact but not these other elements. The Stability and Growth Pact has been strengthened. There is less room for political interference now. The Commission proposals will normally become European law. We have done things on banking union, including transferring the supervision of important systemic banks to the single supervisory mechanism, SSM. That is important. We have the European financial stability facility, EFSF, and as a permanent crisis mechanism, the European Stability Mechanism, ESM, which did not exist before the crisis. There are many different elements where we have tried to draw the conclusion.

Let me mention also the European Systemic Risk Board, ESRB, which is not well known by the broader public. It is a very important innovation because it has this mandate of looking at macro-prudential risks. No one did that at the European level before 2008 and, let me say again, the same in the US and the UK. So, not only a European phenomenon. One clear lesson of the crisis is that these macro-prudential aspects can become very important. Supervisors in the past only looked at the micro aspect. They went into a bank - maybe not assertively enough - and looked at the loan book, loan by loan, and decided whether it was a good loan or a bad loan, whether the provisions were enough. However, there was no one to add it all up, which is the macro-prudential side, to come to a judgement on whether, overall, from a macroeconomic perspective, what banks were doing in a country was excessive or not. So, we have learned lessons in many different areas here in Ireland, but also in the euro area as a whole.