It’s time to start the ball rolling in a direction going well beyond the current mandate of the ESRB and the ESAs. Let me be clear that centralised supervision should not blindly apply common macroprudential ratios across the whole of Europe regardless of national, regional or sectoral credit conditions.
Where circumstances warrant it, transitory variations in capital ratios and other macroprudential tools (such as loan-to-value ratios for household mortgages) must be part of the toolkit. That is needed today: maximum harmonisation, understood to mean, for example, that minimum capital ratios must never vary by country, is not necessary to retain the advantages of the single market.