It goes without saying that progress in the ICT has contributed to the deepening of the globalization process and significantly enhanced labour productivity in many sectors. Global imbalances One of the manifestations of globalization in recent years are global imbalances. In 2005, the US current account deficit approached 6.5% of the GDP, and many forecasts of investment banks point to its further increase in 2006 and 2007. 25 The negative net investment position of the world’s largest economy has moved towards 30% of the GDP in 2005 and, according to all available forecasts, it is bound to deteriorate at a high rate. The large current account deficit in the US is related to the negative savings of households and a strong growth in real property prices. These phenomena have occurred in the recent years not only in the US but also in all Anglo-Saxon countries. 26 Moreover, the current account deficit in the US is financed in a great measure by purchases of American debt securities by the Asian central banks. It entails a significant increase in the exchange reserves of the said banks. For instance, the reserves of the People’s Bank of China went up from USD 166 billion in December 2000 to USD 819 billion in December 2005 and over USD 850 billion in March 2006. It means that China is now ahead of Japan  22  Obstfeld M., Rogoff K. “The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics: Is There a Common Cause?”, NBER Working Paper 7777, 2000.
These include better risk management, a modern range of products offered to customers, or the development of new distribution channels, to name just a few. Regional integration within the EU, however, means that the application of a uniform bank or insurance licence (i.e. taking up activity in any Member State under a licence obtained in the home country) may cause certain asymmetry in the availability of data and a conflict of interest between supervisors of the host country on the one hand, and institution owners and supervisors from the home country on the other. Such conflict may occur as a result of transformation of foreign bank subsidiaries, operating under local laws and fully supervised by the supervisory authorities of the host country, into branches supervised by foreign supervisory authorities. Individual foreign bank branches operating in the new EU Member States frequently constitute a vital element of the banking system, both in terms of the value of assets and deposits, operations on the domestic interbank market and the share in settlements in the payment system. Therefore, they are described as institutions of systemic importance for the domestic market. At the same time, they are not always equally important components of an international banking group, in terms of their size and the profit generated. In such a case, a relatively low importance of an institution may result in less focus on its supervision, both by the foreign bank and the supervisory authority of the home country in which the given bank has obtained its licence.