The effort is clear to see. It is too in terms of foreclosed assets, which have fallen by almost 40% from their 2012 peak, and stood, as at June 2018, at around € billion. Nonetheless, the foregoing figures remain high in historical terms and dynamic management of these types of assets by banks remains necessary. They must set ambitious but credible objectives. 5/8  In designing these objectives, banks should bear in mind the supervisory expectations defined over the past 18 months. In particular, they should be very mindful of the guidelines the SSM published in March 2017 and the addendum thereto released in March 2018. The guidelines are predominantly qualitative. They describe measures, processes and best practices in the management of non-performing exposures, with a view to banks defining strategies that enable them to reduce the accumulated volume of such exposures. The addendum complements the guidelines and sets supervisory expectations as to the prudential provisioning levels for new non-performing exposures, considering as new those classified as such as from 1 April 2018. These expectations set a timeframe of two years for 100% provisioning of unsecured exposures, and one of seven years for 100% coverage of secured exposures. In this latter instance, moreover, provisioning is expected to be gradual, such that it is not left until the last year to set aside the provision.
Unfortunately, a satisfactory agreement has still not been reached: unless we can make progress rapidly in the  1/4  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  industry, which is what we are still hoping for, we will, if necessary, adopt an ACPR recommendation by mid-2023. Jean-Paul Faugère will come back to this later. Last, and most importantly, the return of uncertainty, and difficulties in anticipating risks. One risk is certain: the economic slowdown in Europe and more generally the world. The Banque de France does not anticipate a hard landing for the French economy; but we are collectively – and no doubt durably – having to face an "energy levy" of around 2% of GDP, which must be distributed equitably, including across businesses and households. Regarding financial stability, the number of incidents has multiplied over the last two years, especially in non-bank intermediation – I shall come back to this. For the time being, none of these events has had systemic consequences; but we need to be more vigilant on all levels as we cannot claim to know where the next crisis will come from, and we need to further strengthen our resilience. First by transposing Basel III and the Solvency II review into European law; then by enhancing our supervision of those risks that are still not sufficiently covered by the reforms. II. Five questions on the French financial system The first two seem clear to me and underline the French financial system's relatively favourable position in this new environment.