A large portion of lower-quality assets such as those related to subprime loans were held by European financial institutions, and even today these institutions face the challenge of dealing with these legacy assets. The second vulnerability is their heavy reliance on wholesale dollar funding.
One of the main difficulties in implementing the Lisbon Strategy is that structural reforms often involve short-term adjustment costs to specific members or groups of society, while the benefits are more dispersed and, in some cases, realised or become more visible over a longer-term horizon. The implementation of structural reforms therefore requires considerable far-sightedness and perseverance on the part of policy-makers and social partners.