Mr. Paul Gallagher:

I suppose and Senator, I will be completely guided by you in this but, I mean, one of the difficulties with monetary union is that because you don't any longer control the money supply, you are not in a position to have ... print money and put it into the banks in the case of a failure. So your options for resolving a crisis and a systemic crisis in particular are greatly reduced. That was a big deficit in the legal architecture. My understanding of the architecture was it was designed to address situations where Government deficits and Government profligacy in managing the economy would result in threats to the financial system and that was catered for under the excessive deficit procedure. But they hadn't addressed this and this is, as is now very apparent, was a very significant restriction in the legal architecture.