Today, I will concentrate my remarks on two more practical and immediate goals of the Banking Union: (i) to eliminate the sovereign-bank loop and thereby reduce financial fragmentation and (ii) to repair bank´s balance-sheets, recover the impaired credit channel and consolidate the on-going mild economic recovery.
In my remaining remarks, I will discuss some implications for the financial system’s future and for the role of macro-  1  Banking union and the future of banking, speech by Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB, at the IIEA Conference on “The Future of Banking in Europe”, Dublin, 2 December 2013; Towards the Banking Union, speech by Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB, at the 2nd FIN-FSA Conference on EU Regulation and Supervision “Banking and Supervision under Transformation” organised by the Financial Supervisory Authority, Helsinki, 12 February 2013; Towards a European Banking Union, speech by Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB, Lecture held at the start of the academic year of the Duisenberg School of Finance, Amsterdam, 7 September 2012 (ECB website).