4  Note that this only requires consumers to wish to smooth their spending over time, not that they internalise the implications for future taxes of more government borrowing (so-called “Ricardian equivalence”).
The CRR/CRD started out after a global framework had been agreed in Basel, and this EU level framework was in turn implemented at national level in the Member States. In my day-to-day work I deal with financial stability issues on different levels if one will; As Chair of the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision the scope is global, while as Governor of the Swedish Central Bank I have a national perspective on financial stability although, admittedly, the international agenda and developments play a key role there, too. Being Chair of the Advisory Technical Committee of the ESRB and a member of its decision making body, the General Board, of course provides an EU-level perspective on macroprudential policy and systemic risk. These levels or perspectives are in my view becoming increasingly intertwined, especially after the financial crisis and the lessons learned there. Much of the agenda is indeed set at the global level first. And the way financial markets function today, this is also quite natural. We need at least minimum requirements at the global level. But we also need to strike a balance between common rules of the game in terms of minimum requirements and the need for national flexibility, not least in the EU, which to put it mildly is far from a homogenous group of countries. In fact, the economic and financial conditions differ substantially between the Member States.