Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet:

In the European Union and in the rest of the world, because again we are speaking of a drama which has gone in the US, in the UK and was anticipated, if I may, with the Japanese problem. So the questions you are asking are very good ones. They have been examined by the international community as a whole because the problem that you are asking has been considered by every nation in the circumstances, and the response was we were taking the least bad decision, taking into account that the possible event would have been absolute drama of a great depression in one particular country in the advanced economies as a whole. And this was driving us to this blanket political guarantee, I have been mentioning ... You know pretty well in the UK there has been nationalisation of two banks, that in the US they have managed to avoid AIG, that in a number of other countries, the various institution were also ... they avoided the drama. All that being said, why did we do that? I mean I'm speaking of the governments because we were delivering ourselves liquidity. The central banks, the governments had to come up with a solvency issue. They did that because they wanted to avoid the much more dramatic consequence on their own people, on our fellow citizens, should not be repeated. How should not repeat ... how manage not to repeat that? The system must be much more solid so we have improved at the level of the international community the prudentials considerably, we have improved the capital requirements, we have improved the liquidity ratio, we had ... are tackling with a lot of other issues.

I do not want to say that it's over. In my opinion, we are exactly at the middle of the road in terms of making the financial system much more resilient, much more solid to avoid to be placed in this ridiculous situation, and with a system much more solid where you can have bankruptcy of an individual institution without putting the entire system at stake, you must have rules ex-ante and we have now rules ex-ante in Europe in order to know in which order you are burning creditor A, creditor B, creditor C ... of course, first, the shareholders, second, a number of creditors that are not sub ... and, and, and in order to be sure that we know what to do in such circumstances. It is true that when Lehman Brothers collapsed there was no such rules. The system was incredibly fragile. I gave you that my own mind was entirely, after Lehman Brothers, concentrating on how to avoid the collapse of the house of cards because it was exactly what we had in front of us. So whether or not we have taken all the necessary decisions drawing on the lessons of the crisis is the right question. I would say we have taken a lot of them; we still have a lot of hard work to do. And it's true at the level of each nation, true at the level of Europe, true at the level of the world.