Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 5 February 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Context Phase
Mr. Mario Nava:
No, credit concentration is certainly part of the capital requirement directives. Credit concentration may be looked at in different ways, for example, moving from micro to macro. The most obvious mechanism of credit concentration is excessive concentration to a counter party; for example, a bank lends me too much or a bank lends too much to a particular company. There can be credit concentration to a sector whereby a bank lends too much to a sector. There can also be credit concentration to a region whereby a bank lends too much to exposed activities in that region. This is a movement from micro to macro. One of the things we learned from the crisis is that national supervisors were more on a micro level and for good reason. Among the institutions which were created in 2011 was the European Supervisory Risk Board. This board's specific task is to help countries to carry out macro-prudential supervision and to carry it out in the context of the Single Market. Definitely, credit concentration is an issue but what I am trying to say is that this issue has both micro and macro aspects. Therefore, this issue can be tackled either at the level of one single counter-party by one single supervisor or it can be tackled at higher level and can necessitate some co-ordination of the measures.
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