*  *  *  Thank you, Madame Chairwoman and members of the Econ Committee, for this opportunity to share with you the Basel Committee’s strategy and initiatives to respond to the present financial crisis as it relates to the regulation, supervision and risk management of the banking sector.
In those countries, European banks outside the region have recently played important roles in the financial systems. However, amid the current crisis, those European banks’ lending to local firms declined rapidly and that partly accounted for the deterioration of economic activity in that region. Such situation is, to some degree, also relevant to Japan.