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a concomitant rise in the supply of and demand for securitised products globally. in the case of asia excess savings was mainly channelled into us government bonds and agency debt as a result of exchange rate interventions with the public sector acting as intermediary in the presence of less developed and less open domestic financial markets. securitised products were quite eagerly snapped up elsewhere, as we know, mainly remaining on the balance sheets of financial intermediaries, at least until the public sector had to step in as this episode of international risk sharing – or rather risk concentration – ended in tears. see e. g. moutot et al. ( 2007 ). the use of eaa during the financial crisis as i have argued at the beginning of my talk, the euro area accounts may have seen the light of day at the best possible moment, as the financial crisis broke, which boosted the demand for this kind of data. at the same time, in other respects it might have been the worst possible moment. in a crisis, attention is naturally focused on the latest data. by the time the eaa arrive, with a lag currently of around four months, the situation may have already changed dramatically. thus the headline “ news ” content is limited in relation to complementing the monetary data, which comes out within a month, and with respect to euro area gdp and national account data available at national level. moreover, as a relatively new dataset, it is not " tried and tested ” and, for now, the comparability with other data remains limited in some dimensions. the accounts are presented in nominal terms and as four - quarter - sums, in the absence of a split into prices and volumes and lacking seasonal adjustment for the time being. other issues relate to the degree to which the principle of market valuation ( rather than book values ) can be applied across the accounts and the degree to which sectoral information consolidates intra - sectoral flows and balance sheets in practice. finally, the balancing of the accounts between the financial side and the non - financial side under the joint responsibility of eurostat and the ecb truly represents a challenge of historic dimension. the remaining discrepancies for the household and non - financial corporations sectors provide a measure of additional efforts needed in reconciling the accounts. as i have stressed before, the national accounts are useful not only as a framework for putting together what we know, but also for identifying what we do not yet