As Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chair of the World Economic Forum, notes: these shifts mean that we live in a time of great promise and of great peril. The positive aspects include the ability to connect billions more people through digital networks, improving the efficiency of organisations dramatically.
Second, the post-crisis European financial reform programme has included the establishment of a national macroprudential authority for each EU member country, which inter alia is tasked with leaning against the financial cycle through the setting of a countercyclical capital buffer.12 Moreover, the ECB is empowered to increase the national countercyclical capital buffer, if the level set by the national macroprudential authority is deemed inadequate.