Professor Philip Lane:

That decision was taken before my time, but the issue is live and it could be brought in. That is probably an interaction to be had between ourselves, the Department of Finance and so on. Whether that type of instrument should be brought in is a live issue. There are broader issues about commercial real estate, which we talked about earlier on. Given the role of non-banks in funding commercial real estate, what other measures should be looked at at a European level in that regard? More broadly, globally banks are less and less important than market funding. We can impose capital ratios on banks, but what can we do in respect of market-type investment in terms of stabilising the system? There is a lot of ongoing discussion about that.

I would not want to claim that every instrument has been worked out but we have got a lot more than we had. The most important message is that the capital ratios of the banks here and across Europe are far higher than they were. Their dependence on unstable funding is much less than it used to be. The fundamentals are very different. It is much safer now than it was previously. We would also be much more interventionist, maybe, than was historically the belief 15 years ago.