Mr. Mario Nava:

There are various ways to look at it and the easiest way is probably what I tried to hint at earlier. These banks are not all super big. There are banks from every country. Most of them have grown outside their countries and are active abroad. They are no longer national banks. If one wants the economics to be European, so to speak, then the vision of those who control the economics needs to be a European vision. It made a lot of sense to have equivalence between the level of supervision and the level of the banks' activities. In some countries there are very small local banks and it is questionable whether a supervisor in Frankfurt would be as efficient as a supervisor closer to the bank who knows it better. Such banks are clearly of a smaller dimension. However, one point which I did not make and I should have is that the ECB has the power to supervise any bank, no matter how small. The ECB is responsible for the 120 larger banks, which account for 75% of European assets, and it has the potential to be responsible for the joint supervision, along with the national supervisor, of any of the other banks, which represent the remaining 25% of the assets.