Incidentally, Gräfin Lambsdorff, the idea of making each country individually responsible for creating growth-friendly conditions was something which your late husband already expounded in his famous “Lambsdorff paper”. That document back in 1982 spelled out his plan for boosting growth in Germany and probably sounded the death knell for the SPD/FDP coalition.
In 1913, when the Federal Reserve was brought into existence, 21,000 commercial banks operated across the country. At that time, the five largest banks controlled assets that we estimate were the equivalent of about 2.6 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP).