Here, too, harmonising standards up to a certain degree is a necessary and welcome measure. That said, it is particularly important – as far as LSIs are concerned – to give national supervisors sufficient leeway to allow for the particular characteristics of individual institutions. Supervising LSIs is, and should be, a matter for national supervisors.
The increasingly critical sovereign debt problem in Europe is basically caused by the fact that having already enjoyed most of the benefits arising from European monetary unification, euro area countries are now being asked to pay the price. For some peripheral European countries such as Greece, the main benefit of unification was a dramatic decline in funding costs such as government bond yields.