Access to the trade records of OTC derivatives activity that will be recorded in trade repositories also needs to be made available to be shared among regulators. Fourth, we need greater clarity concerning the responsibilities of the home versus the host country, especially when a bank encounters problems. Fifth, we need to work out how emergency liquidity should be provided on a cross-border basis. If a major financial market utility in London, for example, needs dollar liquidity to stay in operation, who will provide in it? Who will bear the risk and on what terms and conditions? The political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa underscores once again the fact that we operate in a shared world economy in which events in one country and region can have large impacts globally. And to support this globalized economy, global financial firms and a global payments and settlement infrastructure are needed to support this activity. Yet, we currently operate with a financial system that is largely regulated on a country-by-country basis. This is not tenable. What’s required is not some global authority dictating what national authorities can do but instead greater cooperation and trust in exchanging information and agreement on harmonized standards such as those laid out in the Basel III capital  BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  requirements and the CPSS-IOSCO Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures. There needs to be a good faith commitment to try to achieve a level playing field.
Vítor Constâncio: Effectiveness of Monetary Union and the Capital Markets Union Contribution of Mr Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, for the magazine of the Eurofi conference in Malta (5-7 April 2017), 4 April 2017. * * * The euro area recovery is continuing at a moderate, but firming pace, and is broadening gradually across sectors and countries. The ECB’s monetary policy measures have been a key contributor to these positive developments, and the only expansionary macroeconomic policy in support of the recovery. Real GDP growth has expanded for 15 consecutive quarters, growing by 0.5% during the final quarter of 2016. Dispersion in growth rates across euro area countries has fallen. Economic sentiment is at its highest level in nearly six years. The unemployment rate is back down to single-digit figures and over four million more Europeans are employed now than three years ago. Since the onset of the crisis, the ECB has put in place a number of conventional and unconventional monetary policy measures to stimulate the economy and rehabilitate the monetary transmission mechanism, which had become impaired at the height of the crisis. This comprehensive range of measures has worked its way through the financial system, leading to a significant easing of financing conditions for consumers and firms. Together with improving financial and non-financial sector balance sheets, this has strengthened credit dynamics and supported domestic demand. Bank lending rates for both euro area households and non-financial corporations have fallen by over 110 basis points since June 2014.