Mr. Vasileios Madouros:

Silicon Valley Bank was a very particular and extreme case across different dimensions. I am happy to go through the detail if the Deputy wants but it had a combination of characteristics that made it particularly vulnerable and which are not evident in the Irish banking system or, more broadly, in the euro area banking system. That is in terms of the characteristics of the bank but there is also an important dimension about the overall regulatory framework. In the US, the way in which some of the internationally agreed standards are applied and the approach to regulation supervision differs depending on the types of institutions. Silicon Valley Bank was one of the institutions that was a medium-sized, regional bank that was not subject to the full Basel III prudential internationally agreed standards and not subject to annual stress tests, so there were somewhat different requirements, whereas in Europe, including in Ireland, the same standards are applied across the board, whether it is a larger or smaller bank.

To go back to the Deputy's main point and my opening statement, the banking system is resilient to a range of potential adverse shocks, and that can be seen in many different ways. There is bank capital, liquidity and lending standards, to go back to the previous conversation about mortgage rules being much more prudent. Of course, as would be expected, when external shocks hit, and we did it with Brexit, with Covid-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we reorient our efforts at the Central Bank to assess the implications of these. We also engage very closely from a supervisory perspective with financial market participants to ensure they themselves are assessing the impact of these developments and managing any risks. That is what we are doing now in close co-operation with our international counterparts and at a domestic level under the auspices of the financial stability group. We will continue to do that and to remain vigilant.