But I would still say that the rough contours we now have on the map are fairly stable and will stay in place for quite some time. And that is very positive! Important landmarks in this landscape include, of course, the macroprudential oversight by the ESRB, and the Banking Union which focuses on the euro area. The Banking Union has three pillars; the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) which is a big leap forward on the microsupervisory side; the single resolution mechanism (SRM); and a European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), which when it is implemented is meant to weaken the link between banks and their national sovereigns and deliver greater trust in the safety of retail bank deposits. …including national macroprudential frameworks In addition, national frameworks for macroprudential oversight and policy have been put into place all across the Union. The ESRB has played an important role in that work, not least through its recommendations regarding national macroprudential mandates and intermediate objectives and instruments for macroprudential policy. The latter breaks down the overall objective of macroprudential policy into a number of intermediate objectives, making it more clear what types of risks it is aiming at mitigating. This recommendation also provides an indicative list of instruments that Member States may assign to relevant authorities in order to pursue the objectives of macroprudential policy. The formal recommendations have most certainly been vital in providing a benchmark for the EU Member States when setting up their national macroprudential frameworks.

Recommendations can be addressed to the EU as a whole, to one or more individual Member States, European Supervisory Authorities, national supervisory authorities, and to the Commission. As I  |2  mentioned, the General Board makes decisions by voting. And several of the votes that have taken place these almost six years have concerned issuing ESRB recommendations. The ESRB recommendations have contributed to reducing risks in different fields The very first ESRB recommendation targeted risks generated by lending to EU households in foreign currency, proposing measures to mitigate those risks. Although it is always hard to assess something against a counterfactual, I think it is fair to say that the recommendation in question is likely to have been both timely and important. Mitigating policy actions undertaken by national authorities reduced the risks at hand. If this had not happened, events such as the sharp appreciation of the Swiss franc in 2015 – the Swiss franc being one of the currencies in which the relevant loans were denominated – could have generated severe problems for many EU households. This would in turn have affected other financial and economic developments negatively, with the potential to spread beyond the countries directly affected. Other recommendations have, much in line with the ESRB’s macroprudential mandate, targeted a wide range of issues in different areas such as money market funds; funding of credit institutions; national macroprudential mandates; intermediate objectives and instruments of macroprudential policy; and the assessment of cross-border effects of, and voluntary reciprocity for macroprudential policy measures.