The company continued to experience pressing liquidity needs that necessitated rapid draws on the Fed Facility and concerns that AIG’s needs might well exceed the facility’s capacity. Even greater concerns arose out of the continued downgrade risk. The probability of a ratings downgrade was considered high unless the Federal Reserve took further action because the aggregate size of AIG’s draws on the Fed Facility was greater than rating agency expectations – the rating agencies felt that AIG had too much debt – and AIG’s expected third quarter losses, which were to be announced on November 10, 2008, far exceeded analyst estimates. As discussed in Vice Chairman Kohn’s testimony of March 5, 2009, in early October 2008, the Board of Governors approved an additional credit facility (the Securities Borrowing Facility) that permitted the New York Fed to lend to certain AIG domestic insurance subsidiaries up to $ billion in order to allow them to return the cash collateral they received from their securities borrowing counterparties. Additionally, toward the end of October, four AIG affiliates began participating in the Federal Reserve’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) on the same terms and conditions as other participants. The CPFF is a generally available program that involves the purchase, through a special purpose vehicle with financing from the Federal Reserve, of three-month unsecured and assetbacked commercial paper directly from eligible issuers. Notwithstanding AIG’s access to these additional Federal Reserve credit facilities, AIG remained extremely vulnerable to the ongoing and intensifying financial crisis.
I would like to conclude this brief tribute to Benjamin Franklin by quoting one of his phrases that makes an encouraging link  BIS Review 4/2006  1  between success and risk: “there are many ways not to succeed, but the most certain is not to take risks”. Let me turn now to my main topic which is to provide you with an overview of the Single monetary policy of the Eurosystem that consists of the European Central Bank and the 12 national central banks of euro area member states and of its main features and achievements. Quite paradoxically, - The single currency for a long time met with the scepticism from many observers, who regarded it as unrealistic first to launch a new currency and second to envisage a single monetary policy for a group of countries that, despite rapid convergence, continued to display major differences. Interestingly enough, the assumption made by some observers and market participants that the entry interest rates in the Euro on 1 January 1999 would be some kind of average of the interest rates of the composing currencies proved to be wrong.