Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet:

First of all, you have assets and liabilities in all countries. It is true that during all these times, before the crisis, during the crisis, after the crisis, the Irish economy proved a level of flexibility which had no equivalent in the rest of the European countries. So it is not surprising that I was praising that, because it was one of the major, major criticism that we had before the crisis, during the crisis and after the crisis on other countries. If Ireland has been the country that came out of the crisis more rapidly than others, and I would say, with all the painful exercise that it represents, more successfully than the other crises, it is because of this flexibility. I'm not surprised that at times I could be very laudative vis-à-visthis feature of the Irish economy when I would criticise others. To go back to the criticism, what is a lesson, a terrible lesson of the crisis, is that you can present the figures, show that you're losing competitiveness, show that you are going in front of future problems at the level of the euro area as a whole, at the level of any individual countries, in the United States of America, in the UK, everywhere, as long as there is no financial crisis the spontaneous tendency of the, I would say, executive branches is to say, "Let's go on. Why don't you ... it is not broken, why would you fix it?" And it is a terrible lesson that we have. We cannot rely upon market discipline to discipline the various entities at stake. We have to have a good governance. And that governance has to be applied, and this is the reason why SGP and MIP are, in my opinion, absolutely essential. As long as the crisis does not erupt everything was going admirably in the advanced economies.