Sweden’s special requirements need to be reviewed  Source: Sveriges riksbank  Without saying anything about what a future floor for risk-weighted assets may look like, I will simply assume in my example that no bank’s risk-weighted assets may be less than 75 per cent of what they would have been if the Basel Committee's standardised methods had been used. I would like to point out that this 75 per cent should not be seen as an indication of any future calibration of a floor for riskweighted assets. I have chosen this figure because 75 per cent lies between the 60 and 90 per cent that the Basel Committee mentioned in its consultation document in March 2016.4 Given this assumption, our most recent calculations indicate that the major banks’ aggregated risk-weighted assets would increase from the current SEK 2,800 billion to around SEK 4,500 billion. This would mean an increase in the current risk-weighted assets of more than 50 per cent. If, and I would like to emphasise if, Sweden retains its national special requirements in the future, the banks’ CET 1 capital requirements will increase by more than 50 per cent, or around SEK 300 billion. This would of course be a significant increase from the current capital requirement levels.
While European labor markets are not – and will never be – as integrated as in the United States, goods, services, and capital markets are now fully unified, in many regards to a greater extent than in any other countries. Our studies show that business cycles tend to be more and more synchronized with time, an evolution which allows for greater efficiency and sustainability for a common monetary policy. This shows that monetary union is a self sustaining process: convergence can be a result, as much as a condition of economic integration. This has been termed the "endogeneity of optimum currency area" effects. Enlargement of the euro area As I said before, in contrast with some gloomy predictions made ten years ago, the euro is a success story. Far from being a closed Club, the Euro area is open and has a true calling for covering all the EU members, in so far as they fulfil the convergence criteria. Indeed, adopting the Euro can be seen as a legal obligation for all EU members once they have fulfilled the Maastricht convergence criteria. Monetary union is an on-going process. Starting in 1999 with 11 members, the Euro area has regularly expended. On 1 January 2001, Greece joined the Euro area. More recently, on 1 January 2007, Slovenia was the first of the 10 New Members  2  BIS Review 43/2007  States entered into the EU in 2004 to adopt the Euro; this brought the current number of members of the Euro area to 13.