*  *  *  Madam Chair, Honourable members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, It is a pleasure for me to be back in your committee at such a decisive moment. The next days and weeks until the end of this legislature will show whether the euro area will be able to take another key step towards banking union.
And about 75 percent of interest rate and credit default swaps are now centrally cleared, which allows for greater transparency and more consistent risk management.6 While the move to central clearing has made the system safer, we need to make sure that the central counterparties have the resources and risk-management practices to withstand plausible but severe shocks.7 Many of the statutory provisions and regulations put in place to effect these changes were novel; it is not likely that we would have gotten everything exactly right on the first attempt.