If we lift our growth rate to say 5 percent per year we will double the size of our economy in 20 years and that is a huge 30 year difference. If we can even grow by 8 percent per year, we can do the same in only 12 years. So the difference can be a lifetime.
Most prominent in this regard is the Basel II IRB approach for risk-weighted capital requirements. The IRB approach, which generally applies in the United States to all bank holding companies with $ billion or more in assets, was developed a decade ago in an effort to align risk weightings more closely to the increasingly sophisticated quantitative risk-assessment techniques in the financial industry.