This reaction seems to reflect the incentive of managers and shareholders to  23  Indeed, in the context of the recent turmoil, while the annual growth in undrawn credit lines, following an increase up to mid-July 2007, has been on a declining trend and moved into negative territory in the course of 2008, the annual growth in the draw-downs of credit lines has been increasing up to the third quarter of 2008. 24  This is based on information derived from the Eurosystem’s Bank Lending Survey. favour remuneration on equity and human capital, rather than long-term investment. This is not in line with the macroeconomic objectives. This is why we insist that the profits made in these months by the banking sector – which were obtained thanks to the interventions by the policy authorities to keep the system going, and thus ultimately by the taxpayers – should be used to increase the capital rather than to reward the banks’ managers and shareholders. This applies not only to banks that have received direct assistance through guarantees and public capital injections, but also to the indirect benefits obtained as a result of low interest rates. 5. Conclusion  The pre-crisis period was marked by unsustainable credit policies by the banks and, more generally, by the financial system. These policies were encouraged by inadequate supervision and slack prudential regulation, and also by the excessive influence the financial system had on regulatory mechanisms. This caused the biggest crisis of the post-war period.

Philipp Hildebrand: Lessons from the crisis for global financial market infrastructure Summary of a speech by Mr Philipp Hildebrand, Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, at the Zermatt Symposium, Avenir suisse, Zermatt, 25 August 2009. The complete speech can be found in German on the Swiss National Bank’s website (www.snb.ch). *  *  *  The financial market infrastructure, in other words, the systems for trading, clearing and settling payments and financial instruments, is essential for the operation of the financial system. Thus far in the financial crisis, financial market infrastructure has stood up well overall and helped to prevent the existing uncertainty in the financial system from becoming even greater. This holds true both for payment and settlement systems in Switzerland and for the global financial market infrastructure. However, time and again, it becomes apparent that the infrastructure for clearing and settling transactions is not keeping up with rapidly growing financial markets. In recent years, this has been most obvious in the OTC derivatives market. Pressured by supervisory authorities and central banks, market participants are now developing safer and more efficient clearing and settlement arrangements for OTC derivatives. These efforts include the establishment of central counterparties, which facilitate market participants’ risk management, promote market transparency and reduce the complexity of the financial system. To the extent that the market infrastructure reduces the interconnections between individual financial institutions, it contributes to the long-term strategy aimed at finding ways of liquidating large and complex financial institutions in an orderly way.