Only seven euro area countries (including the three home countries of my fellow panel members) had enacted or announced a countercyclical capital buffer requirement above zero. In the euro area banking sector as a whole, countercyclical 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  capital buffer requirements accounted for only 0.2% of risk-weighted assets at the end of 2019.
By contrast, structural buffer requirements, comprising the capital conservation buffer, systemic risk buffers and buffers for systemically important institutions, stood at 3.4%. Unlike the countercyclical capital buffer, structural buffers were in principle not designed to be releasable. But, unlike minimum requirements, buffers are there to absorb unexpected losses and to help sustain lending under stress conditions.