Various actors in the economy may be relieved from pressures to take up their own responsibilities, thereby lowering the incentives to correct imbalances, unwind past excesses and redress the course of unsustainable economic and financial policies. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Second – and more fundamentally – non-standard monetary policy cannot solve the underlying structural economic and financial problems. The banking union – restoring financial stability and reintegrating financial markets The banking union aims at building an integrated financial framework to safeguard financial stability. To this end, it is absolutely imperative to have both an EU framework for single supervision, the SSM, as well as an integrated resolution framework, the SRM. Stability comes from having two pillars. The Single Supervisory Mechanism One particular institutional shortcoming of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) derives from the inconsistency between a single monetary policy and national supervisory competences. A step up of supervisory powers to the supranational level was therefore needed to reverse financial fragmentation, with a view to breaking the link between sovereigns and banks, restoring the principle of self-responsibility and avoid objectionable transfers. By centralising supervision, the SSM should ensure uniform practices across Europe and overcome the home-host cross-border supervisory discussions and the associated national bias. The establishment of a single supervisor marks a new epoch in the EU financial framework, which may be comparable to the creation of monetary union at the end of the last century.

showroomprivé.com, France’s second largest flash sale web retailer, which has accepted bitcoins since 2014]. Second, as intermediaries in exchanges, crypto-assets are far less effective than a currency with legal tender status, insofar as (i) their price volatility makes it hard to use them as a means of payment, (ii) they generate transaction fees that are far too high for simple retail transactions, and (iii) they offer no guarantee of a refund in the event of fraud. Third, the fact that they have no intrinsic value means that they cannot be used to create trustworthy stores of value. In addition, crypto-assets may be conduits for financial risk, security risk and especially risks of cyber-attacks, money laundering and terrorist financing. These would represent major risks for users and hence for the orderly functioning of our payment system if crypto-assets were ever to play a major role in that system. II- In this complicated context, with crypto-assets undergoing technical and economic trials that offer opportunities but also present material risks for our payment system, should we consider establishing a regulatory framework and supervisory approach and, if so, how should we go about this? 1) Various courses of action are available to the public authorities. The first would be to ignore crypto-assets. But even if the volumes in play remain small and do not represent a threat to financial stability, the risks that I mentioned earlier must be addressed. The second course of action would be to ban crypto-assets outright because of these same risks.