The ECB’s interventions have been timely since the outbreak of the crisis, in the sense that on the day in which tensions from the US sub-prime mortgage market first spilled over to euro money markets, the ECB reacted quickly by temporarily offering unlimited amounts of liquidity to the banking sector, to avoid that liquidity tensions would spill over to other segments of the financial markets and to maintain control over short-term unsecured interest rates.
We thus need to stay alert and search for ways to update and enhance our anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing frameworks. I will now elaborate on our – the Bank of Lithuania’s – approach on dealing with money laundering and terrorist financing. The Bank of Lithuania constantly monitors and assesses vulnerabilities in market participants’ risk control, anti-money laundering and terrorist financing prevention frameworks.