During the crisis, pro-cyclicality exacerbated asset price changes as financial institutions attempted to sell-off assets once they had exceeded their leverage ratios, which in turn resulted in lowered market prices. Capitalization requirements and accounting regulations subsequently initiated a negative feed-back loop which was intensified by adverse developments in the credit markets as institutions were required to mark their trading books to market.
Moreover, data timeliness and data frequency will have to be significantly improved. This means that there is still need for an additional ECB regulation on insurance statistics. 5  A strong case for statistical cooperation  The days when statistics was just about number crunching clearly are history.