is well on track and its go - live is set in 2015. after two years of negotiations, central securities depositories ( csds ) have now been asked to sign – by june 2012 at the latest – a binding legal contract to participate in t2s. this will mark a key milestone in the project. combined with the future legislation on csds and ccps as well as mifid, t2s will provide the operational framework to stimulate competition in the post - trade environment. moving on to banking crisis management, we fully support the commission ’ s initiative to introduce an eu bank recovery and resolution framework that should contribute to address current obstacles to the effective crisis management of eu cross - border financial institutions. every member state should have a broad set of tools, such as recovery and resolution plans, bis central bankers ’ speeches asset separation and bridge banks. as regards more specifically bail - in, a right balance needs to be struck between the need to comply with international standards ( fsb key attributes for resolution ) and the need to avoid undesired negative effects on bank funding also in light of current market conditions. in this perspective any decisions about the use of “ bail - in - able ” securities should be delayed for some years. at the same time, any mandatory issuance of “ bail - in - able ” instruments should be reserved to systemically relevant institutions at the national and european levels. smaller institutions would have difficulties in placing such securities in the market and are easier to resolve without such instruments. for systemic institutions i see “ bail - in - able ” debt securities as an important tool being capable of supporting the resolution process by absorbing losses with an efficient burden sharing within the private sector thereby reducing taxpayers ’ support. another important dimension of the resolution regime refers to the desirable creation of resolution funds that would be financed by the financial sector and would play an important role, particularly in resolution of cross - border institutions. in this perspective, we said in the escb opinion, published in may last year, that : “ … the establishment of a network of national funds should not exclude the possibility of establishing, at a later stage, an european fundof - funds to address the issues which may arise in respect of cross - border banks. … it should also not be excluded to move the establishment of an european resolution fund up in the agenda. ” in view of the importance of the adoption of a clear resolution regime to banks and to eliminate uncertainty, it would be important that the commission ’ s proposals

estimating the evolution of the wealth distribution over long periods of time. using this approach, gabriel has provided us with estimates of the top wealth shares in the united states over the last century. 1 this influential work shows that wealth concentration in the united states was high at the beginning of the 20th century, fell from 1929 to 1978, and has continuously increased since then. the substantial increase in wealth inequality since the early 1980s has been driven by the very richest households ( the top 0. 1 % of the wealth distribution and above ). gabriel then used the estimates of the wealth distribution to construct “ distributional national accounts ” for the united states. 2 these accounts combine tax, survey and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income across households. importantly, in contrast to previous estimates which only capture the income recorded in aggregate statistics in an incomplete fashion, distributional national accounts consistently cover all national income in aggregate data. in addition, this work provides estimates for both pre - tax and after - tax income, documenting the extent to which the tax system has dampened the increase in us income inequality over the past few decades. gabriel ’ s findings for the united states have recently been extended to many other countries, including large emerging economies, in the “ world inequality database ”, which provides data on household inequality calculated using a common and consistent methodology. the time series in 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches the world inequality database are the result of an ingenious combination of various data sources, including survey data, tax data and, sometimes, information from named lists of wealthy individuals to improve estimates of the very top of the wealth distribution. the world inequality database has substantially benefited the academic community by providing easily accessible data, and it has spurred a wider debate about the causes and consequences of inequality. for example, the database has documented diverse trends in the dynamics of income and wealth inequality since 1980 across countries, suggesting national institutions play a key role in affecting inequality. the data show that in recent decades incomes of the poorer half of the global population grew significantly thanks to high growth in asia, in particular in china and india. gabriel ’ s extensive work measuring the distribution of wealth and income has allowed us to think more rigorously and in quantitative terms about the main determinants of changes in household wealth distribution. at this point, allow me to stress that this topic is especially important in the euro area, where the public debate on the expansionary stance of monetary policy is sometimes caricatured in terms of