once european states had decided to go in the direction of a monetary union, the point was not only to put some people together in a room to take decisions but to enable that group of people to take good and transparent decisions. in view of the different cultural backgrounds, different operational and institutional frameworks were underpinned by different data requirements. with a common policy making - set - up what would be the statistical adjustment requirement? the only way forward was to establish a common framework for existing statistics as well as developing a set of new statistics. this work started well before the start of monetary union and there still remains room for improvement. in this regard, i would like to highlight the important work done by the european system of statistics. so, faced with a new type of user requirements ( i. e. monetary policy for what is at present a monetary union of soon 13 countries ), the european statistical system ( ess ) and the european system of central banks ( escb ) statistical services successfully established the needed statistical framework. it was therefore important to define a set of harmonised data to be collected by the respective national authorities, be they central banks or national statistical institutes, in all of the euro area member countries. at the same time it should be highlighted that most of these national institutions already collected data for their own national needs and that the development of the euro - zone statistical needs did not necessarily offset the national statistical requirements designed for and evolved in a national policy - making environment. in this regard, it may be pointed out that part of the existing national and euro area statistical needs are unfortunately not totally coherent reflecting the transfer of monetary policy making to the higher european level while retaining other areas of economic policy at the national level. in this regard, i strongly urge users of statistics i. e. policy makers as well as compilers to reflect on the fact that reacting to changing societies does not only imply the development of new statistics but also a strong reflection on the need to maintain currently available “ old ” statistics. this phenomenon probably reflects the inertia of existing institutions and the resistance of national bureaucracies to transferring competences to the supranational level. very often these needs are defined without consultation of other institutions already collecting data, or there is consultation, but minor differences concerning the data needs used to collect different sets of data persist. what would be better would be to try to overcome these differences and to collect a single set. a single set might not be perfect for all the

up approach instrumented by means of a joint survey of the bcl and the cssf with a representative sample of domestic credit institutions covering a large share of total assets. without going into the details of this survey, the results of which will be presented and discussed at the occasion of an abbl conference scheduled to take place on 24th may, it is already clear that luxembourg banking sector does on aggregate fall short of the required standards at the current juncture. i draw five preliminary lessons from these results : first, the bcl working at home with the industry and abroad with standard - setting entities, needs monitoring the implementation of the upcoming liquidity standards during the observation period, and especially the lcr. second, it seems almost unavoidable that the new standards will induce certain banks to adjust their business models in order to comply with the new agreed pricing of liquidity risk components and offer products with more stable or more fee - based income. third, as mentioned above, the bcl will use the survey and its internal studies during the upcoming review and calibration process at the international level in order to flag those issues that are considered to unduly penalize sound business models. fourth, contrasting and comparing the top - down and the bottom - up approach is a rich source of information that the bcl intends to use for refining national regulation taking into account current and future qualitative and quantitative liquidity requirements and for designing reporting requirements. finally, the bcl foresees a continued and increased focus on on - site visits and complementing the daily liquidity reporting in the near future by other requirements following the implementation of basel iii as a clear way of strengthening liquidity surveillance and boosting the robustness of luxembourg banks. concluding remarks let me conclude with a few final remarks. when times are good, there is tendency to feel that there is too much regulation. when times turn bad, everyone wonders why there was not enough regulation in place to prevent bad states of the world to materialize. regulators and supervisors experience thus a perennial need to justify their role and actions. certainly, no regulation is perfect. it is especially difficult to develop a regulation that is conceptually broad enough to generate a level playing field, and it is at the same time flexible enough to take national specificities into account and to dampen potential negative effects on the real economy. basel iii regulations strive to fulfill these requirements but, as i reflected during this talk, more work is still needed. the bcl is