It was the case, even when the national central banks were not independent. Everybody was expecting the central bank to express publicly such opinions – whether it was in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in France etc. Perhaps in the UK it would be considered not exactly part of the division of labour but I’ll let you judge.
These initial asset quality problems then exposed other weaknesses that led to institutional failures and the international collapse in confidence. This story has been well told. Every crisis, of course, has its own particular pathology but that fact in itself doesn’t explain their relative impacts. Why was this one so much more severe than most of the others?