It is of course essential and urgent to enable the ESM to support banking systems in order to overcome some of the tensions in the euro area, and there is intense public debate about how best to structure the SSM.
In my introductory remarks today, however, I would like to take a step back from that debate and instead reflect more broadly on why a banking union is important for any monetary union to function well and why it is natural to locate the SSM with, or at least “close to”, the central bank in such a union.