I was at the National Bank [of Belgium] in Brussels in a meeting with European colleagues. One colleague from the Bank of England suddenly had to leave in a hurry because there were problems with Northern Rock, where customers were lining up in the street to take out their savings. For me that was frightening.
I had never thought that something like that could happen again. I remember saying to my wife at the time: I hope that we won’t have a banking crisis in Belgium, because something like that goes on for a decade. The risks we were exposed to then were enormous. Fortis alone already had a balance sheet of € trillion then, if you include insurance.