The “Large banks” panel shows results for all banks with total assets of £ or above, and separately calculated results for all banks with total assets of £ or above. For both of these definitions of “Large”, results are separately calculated using six definitions of distress: 1) Distress defined as receiving worst possible supervisory rating between July 2007 and December 2008; 2) receiving worst possible supervisory rating between July 2007 and December 2009; 3) any instance of default, receipt of state aid, or merger with or acquisition by another bank under stressed conditions between July 2007 and December 2008; 4) any instance of default, receipt of state aid, or merger with or acquisition by another bank under stressed conditions between July 2007 and December 2009; 5) meets definition 1 or 3; 6) meets definition 2 or 4. Similarly, the “Small banks” panel shows results for all banks with total assets of less than £ and results for all banks with total assets of less than £ in each case using all six definitions of distress. 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  10  Figure 2: Illustration of a graduated prudential framework Under a graduated prudential framework, the regulatory rules a firm faces would widen and become more complex as a firm grows larger and/or undertakes a wider range of activities that are more complex, converging eventually on the Basel standards, as illustrated by the following diagrams.
As you know, we in the Executive Board decided to leave the repo rate unchanged at our latest monetary policy meeting. At the same time, however, we were in agreement that the Swedish business cycle is fairly close to the point at which it is reasonable to give monetary policy a less expansionary stance. Although we all endorsed the outlook for inflation and the economy in the Inflation Report a number of us were of the opinion that it provided scope for somewhat different interpretations of exactly when the interest rate needs to be raised. I myself and two other members  2  4  For a more detailed overview of the debate; see Bean, C. (2003), "Asset Prices, Financial Imbalances and Monetary Policy: Are Inflation Targets Enough? ", speech at a BIS conference on "Monetary Stability, Financial Stability and the Business Cycle", 28-29 March 2003, Basel, Switzerland. (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2003/speech200.pdf)  BIS Review 88/2005  interpreted the analysis in such a way that we deemed an increase of 0.25 percentage points to be warranted already at the time of the monetary policy meeting. Allow me to say something about the reasons that, in my opinion, suggest that it would have been appropriate to take a first step towards less expansionary monetary policy at the beginning of December. One is that there hardly can be any doubt now that we are in the midst of a strong, stable cyclical upswing.