Recommendations can be addressed to the EU as a whole, to one or more individual Member States, European Supervisory Authorities, national supervisory authorities, and to the Commission. As I  |2  mentioned, the General Board makes decisions by voting. And several of the votes that have taken place these almost six years have concerned issuing ESRB recommendations. The ESRB recommendations have contributed to reducing risks in different fields The very first ESRB recommendation targeted risks generated by lending to EU households in foreign currency, proposing measures to mitigate those risks. Although it is always hard to assess something against a counterfactual, I think it is fair to say that the recommendation in question is likely to have been both timely and important. Mitigating policy actions undertaken by national authorities reduced the risks at hand. If this had not happened, events such as the sharp appreciation of the Swiss franc in 2015 – the Swiss franc being one of the currencies in which the relevant loans were denominated – could have generated severe problems for many EU households. This would in turn have affected other financial and economic developments negatively, with the potential to spread beyond the countries directly affected. Other recommendations have, much in line with the ESRB’s macroprudential mandate, targeted a wide range of issues in different areas such as money market funds; funding of credit institutions; national macroprudential mandates; intermediate objectives and instruments of macroprudential policy; and the assessment of cross-border effects of, and voluntary reciprocity for macroprudential policy measures.
I should mention that the ASC, with its composition of distinguished academics with different expertise, and in a sense more independent views, has been a catalyst in some of the work I  |3  just mentioned. Some of the topics on which the ESRB has produced and published valuable contributions include, for instance, the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures; macroprudential assessments of various issues related to shadow banks, an area where there is still a lot of new ground to cover; the insurance sector; and commercial and residential real estate markets in the EU, to name just a few. I am also thinking of the work on structural issues regarding the banking sector, for instance in a report called “Is Europe overbanked?” by the ASC. This is a very relevant question in my view, and one that we will most likely get back to in the first panel today, where the ECB Vice President will lead the panel discussion addressing the effects of the low interest rate environment. The latter is another topic which benefits from being assessed from a macroprudential viewpoint, and which is naturally also on the ESRB’s agenda. The regular identification and monitoring of potential systemic risks also benefits from the ESRB’s broad composition I would like to mention another core task for the ESRB, namely identifying potential risks to the EU financial system at an early stage and, as mentioned, issuing warnings or recommendations about policy actions to mitigate such risks when deemed appropriate.