This may explain, for example, why investors did not rebalance away from US Treasuries throughout the global financial crisis, despite the stark deterioration in the United States’ fiscal position. For currency unions, however, absolute fundamentals arguably matter more.
Apart from the benefits of a multilateral netting scheme, we also needed a real time settlement system, for its superior characteristics in terms of risk control and simplicity, and because it would be very useful for our liquidity provision mechanisms.