They too are predominantly retail, not wholesale banks, operating a very traditional business model, one that has largely shielded them from the problems of the international financial turmoil of these last years. They take deposits from (mainly) small local savers and make loans to (mainly) small or medium-sized local businesses and help people buy their houses by providing mortgages. Their officers, like those of the cooperative banks elsewhere, belong to the community in which they operate and generally know their customers and the local environment. In addition, one of them is involved in the European Investment Fund’s Jeremie programme, a programme designed specifically to help small and medium sized enterprises. The bank in question has committed over EUR 5 million over a period of three years to some 280 local SME beneficiaries under the programme. Indeed, one could say that it is mainly in their ownership structure that the local commercial banks, which are joint stock (or “shareholder value”) banks, differ from cooperative banks. In all other respects they are not very different. So that leaves us with the question: is there or is there not scope for setting up a cooperative bank in Malta? Is there or isn’t there space for such an institution? Or is the local market too small, while our community is being adequately served by the banks already operating here? I think it is not for me to answer these questions.
In addition, there is limited information on regional consumer prices and how much variation there is in regional inflation rates. 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  8  Here in the UK, interest rates were lowered from 5% to 0.5% between September 2008 and March 2009 by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). This took interest rates to their lowest levels in the Bank of England’s over 300-year history. This was augmented with £ of asset purchases between 2009 and 2012, almost exclusively in government securities. In interest-rate equivalent terms, this amounted to a monetary stimulus worth around 7 percentage points. 16  Exceptional times called for exceptional measures. What impact have these exceptional measures had? One simple way to begin to answer that question is to look at how aggregate activity has evolved in the period since. Chart 11a looks at the growth in inflation-adjusted GDP per head across the UK regions since the MPC’s monetary stimulus was put in place. All regions have experienced a rise in nominal GDP per head over that period, averaging 12%. Not all regions have experienced an inflation-adjusted increase, with growth strongest in London (a rise of 6.6%) and weakest in Northern Ireland (a contraction of 4.6%). Unemployment rates rose sharply during the financial crisis. But they have since fallen across every region in the UK since 2011 and by roughly similar amounts, on average 3 percentage points (Chart 12a).