However, to do our job, we need data from banks – not just on internal models but on all sorts of things. And this data needs to be comparable across the euro area; we must be able to compare banks with their peers, be they Irish, French, German, whatever. We therefore need a European approach to reporting.
As has been the case for some time, the central question about the outlook remains whether business firms will quicken the pace of investment now that some, but by no means all, of the geopolitical uncertainties have been resolved. A modestly encouraging sign is the backlog of orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft, which has been moving up in recent months.