These have enabled banks to obtain long-term funding at beneficial interest rates, which may temporarily be as low as -1%, on the condition that the participating banks maintain their supply of credit to the real economy in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. To reinforce this measure, the ECB also eased the collateral eligibility criteria for banks in its refinancing operations, thus increasing the volume of funds they may obtain. These measures have been highly successful. In the June TLTRO-III operation, participating banks received liquidity totalling € trillion, an all-time high in Eurosystem refinancing operations. The available evidence suggests that participating banks are using a significant portion of the funding received to continue to provide liquidity to the real economy. In short, the measures taken by the ECB under its refinancing operations are playing a key part in preserving the supply of bank credit. And, in an economic setting as difficult as the present one, they are helping to hold interest rates on bank loans at historically low levels and to support the vigour shown by new bank lending since the start of the crisis. Indeed, in Spain the volume of credit to the non-financial private sector has expanded again after ten years of deleveraging and posted year-on-year growth of 2.5% in the summer months.
Jan F Qvigstad: Understanding macroprudential regulation Introductory remarks by Mr Jan F Qvigstad, Deputy Governor of Norges Bank (Central Bank of Norway), at the workshop on “Understanding macroprudential regulation”, organised by Norges Bank, Oslo, 29 November 2012. *  *  *  Dear all, It is a pleasure to welcome you to Norges Bank for this workshop on Understanding Macroprudential Regulation. The topic of the workshop is timely; Authorities in all parts of the world are now actively debating macroprudential policy. Academic research provides a necessary foundation, both for the design and the implementation of such regulations. During my years of service here at the central bank, and also some years at the Treasury, I have had my fair share of dealings with banking and financial crises in Norway. In the 1990s, Norway was hit by a severe banking crisis. Three of the four largest banks failed. Required capital injections were more than three and a half per cent of GDP. This is substantially more than the percentage share that euro area banks currently need to recapitalise. Ever since the Norwegian banking crisis in the early 1990s, our banking industry has been regulated more strictly than banks in comparable countries. For instance, bank capital definitions have been tighter, while packaging loans into complex instruments was in practice not permitted until 2007. Financial supervision has also been rather strict.