This of course does not mean the Dutch banking sector is a calm landscape, as we witnessed with the full blown financial crisis of 2008 to 2010. During this crisis, the Netherlands had its fair share of crisis management experiences. And that was actually very much in the hands of Mr. Nout Wellink, depicted on the lower right hand side of the gallery.
Much was made of China “missing” its 2014 growth target, by one tenth of a percentage point. (Let us in Australia hope our target misses are all only of that size.) Much was also made of the lower target set for 2015, but this was always going to occur, and successive growth objectives are likely to get progressively lower over the years ahead.