In reality, the capital drawdown banks would have faced, had the COVID shock happened in 2007, would have been a function of their 2007 balance sheets – so the loan losses may well have been higher than those we pencilled in for banks as part of the illustrative scenario. 6 In the first quarter of the year, major UK banks expanded their net lending to businesses by £ (compared to a reduction in net lending of £ by these banks in 2019 as a whole. 6  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  6  outweighed by the losses they would suffer from the broader economic damage that would result from a widespread withdrawal of credit. No financial system of course can be infinitely resilient. Given its function of providing credit and risk mitigation to firms and households, the banking system is exposed to the real economy. There is inevitably some level of damage to the economy that the banking system cannot weather. Over the coming months we will learn more about how well the post crisis reforms work under stress. One particular area of attention will be the usability of the capital and liquidity buffers intended to absorb a tail event shock. The results of the FPC’s desktop stress test reinforces the message that the clue, as they say, is in the name: the buffers exist precisely to buffer a shock like this. All elements of the buffers banks now have are intended to be usable in stress.
First, as we learned 10 years ago, we need to look at how the system as a whole has performed under stress and whether and how it might be strengthened. Focussing on the resilience of one or another element without understanding its broader effect will give us a false picture. Second, such a comprehensive assessment, cannot be done by one jurisdiction or one international standard setter. And in this respect, one of the other, major planks of the post financial crisis reforms, the creation of the international Financial Stability Board (FSB) – has put us in a far better position than ten years ago. The FSB has been active and in crisis mode from the outset of this crisis. It has enabled jurisdictions and international standard setters to work together, under its umbrella to share experience, to assess risks to financial stability, and in to discuss ‘what works’ (and what doesn’t work) in addressing those risks. The FSB’s assessments also provide input to the political level of the G20. And to ensure national authorities respond in a consistent way, the FSB agreed Principles, adopted by the G20, which reiterate commitment to common international standards, using their inbuilt flexibility including buffers, while leaning against regulatory rollback. Going forward, and just as after the global financial crisis, the FSB can and should enable us to bring together the various perspectives in the central bank and regulatory communities to determine whether we do indeed need more resilience in the system and, if so, how to achieve it.