However, new regulation may affect the magnitude of these affects, and the size of the market-based financial sector may end up being smaller after the crisis. In Europe, the commercial banks dominate the financial sector. 18  Kohn (2006, 2008) specifies three conditions that should be fulfilled for central banks to take “extra action” to deal with a possible asset-price bubble: “First, policymakers must be able to identify bubbles in a timely fashion with reasonable confidence. Second, a somewhat tighter monetary policy must have a high probability that it will help to check at least some of the speculative activity. And third, the expected improvement in future economic performance that would result from the curtailment of the bubble must be sufficiently great.” He concludes, also in 2008 and after thorough considerations, that those conditions would rarely be met. See also Kohn (2009). BIS Review 16/2010  9  In particular, if there is evidence of rapidly-rising house prices and mortgage loans, and these developments are deemed to be unsustainable and a possible bubble, there are much more effective instruments than policy rates. Restrictions on loan-to-value ratios and minimum mortgages and requirements of realistic cash-flow calculations for house buyers with realistic interest rates are much more effective in putting a break on possible unsustainable developments than a rise in the policy rates. In particular, more transparency about future policy rates, in the form a policy-rate path published by the central bank, may help in providing realistic information about future interest rates.
Thus, there is a long intellectual tradition linking rule of law and sound money to functioning of free markets. But this connection found perhaps its clearest expression in the ordoliberal school that developed in Germany in the 1930s. Conceived at the University of Freiburg by Walter Eucken and Franz Boehm, the central understanding of ordoliberalism was that a stable and well-functioning market economy required a strong legal and institutional  1  “Moneta debt esse quasi quaedam lex et quaedam ordinacio firma”. Nicolas Oresme, Traité de la première invention des monnaies (ca. 1355). BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  framework. Pure laissez-faire capitalism was unstable and liable to capture by monopolies. Collectivist central planning, on the other hand, led towards waste and totalitarianism. Thus, as the ordoliberals saw it, the role of government was to frame markets in such a way that actual outcomes would approximate the theoretical outcome in a perfectly competitive market. Achieving such outcomes could imply de-regulation, if government was interfering too much in market processes, or re-regulation, if market failures were apparent – a feature that distinguished it from a laissez-faire approach. In other words, the role of government was both to untie the “invisible hand”, and to keep it firmly cuffed to the rule of law. At the same time, ordoliberalism recognised the crucial importance of monetary and economic stability to a well-functioning market.