17 These allowances recognise that higher loan-tovalue or loan-to-income mortgages can be appropriate in certain circumstances, as laid out in the banks’ own credit policies, and can help to ease some valid concerns about market access difficulties, without permitting excessive leverage or credit risk to build up across the system as a whole.
In addition, in December 2015, the Bank announced the first settings of both the countercyclical capital buffer and other-systemically important institutions (or O-SII) capital buffer. 18 These measures are part of the Capital Requirements Regulation toolkit which is applicable in all EU Member States.