11  No system of regulation is perfect, but the record of banking sector performance since 2004, when the current banking legislation was enacted, indicates that the primary objectives of bank regulation have been realised and that this has been achieved without significant negative impacts on lending growth and intermediation. Thank you for listening. 12
Even countries which, for a long time, had tied their currency regimes much more closely to everyday policy-making have evidently come to recognise the advantages of unpolitical monetary systems in the run-up to Maastricht. This does not, of course, rule out the possibility of the earlier tradition occasionally rearing its head in some isolated issues.