Preventing risks has to start at the national level – if property prices are soaring in a particular city, is the problem related to mortgage lending or is it related to land-use planning? In the latter case, that certainly falls outside the ECB’s purview.
Financial institutions are fundamentally stronger than they were in 2008, because they’re better capitalised and they have to comply with stricter rules, particularly when it comes to measuring their risks. For example, Basel III has imposed limits on banks’ use of internal models – previously, they could calculate themselves the risks they were taking, and this made them overconfident.