Mr. Klaus Regling:

The problem is that no one can be absolutely certain about that. We learned that through Lehman's. I remember very well that the weekend before Lehman's was allowed to fail, after the US authorities had rescued several other big banks, they reached the point where on that particular weekend in mid-September they decided to let one go. I remember many editorials in global newspapers that said indeed the time has come to let one of these big banks fail. That indicates to me that nobody can really pretend that he or she knew the consequences. Lehman's has shown that the consequences can be unpredictable. We just do not have experience. In today’s world where even banks that do not belong to the top ten can be so interconnected through new financial instruments that did not exist 20 years ago, the implications go far beyond what one could imagine. That is the lesson from Lehman's. Therefore, it is very hard to say what exactly would have happened if one of the big European banks would have gone under. At the time it was decided that after Lehman's it was too risky to do that also in Europe.