Around a year ago, a rapid recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic was well under way in Europe. Those positive prospects were crushed last February by Russia's illegal and brutal attack against Ukraine. The horrific bombardment of critical Ukrainian infrastructure has left millions of Ukrainians at the mercy of winter conditions, and no end to the war is in sight.
Similarly, initiatives to create some sort of an all-encompassing financial stability index have failed to convince so far. Instead, the concept of financial stability involves various financial intermediaries, financial market segments and infrastructure, for which a whole host of different quantitative and qualitative indicators exist. As a consequence, determining the degree of financial stability remains a highly complex task.