Boris Vujčić: Resilience, integration and competitiveness: building the future of European banking

Keynote speech by Boris Vujčić, Vice-President of the ECB, at the tenth annual conference of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB)

It is a great pleasure to participate in this conference marking the ESRB’s 15th anniversary.

As we know, the ESRB was established 15 years ago as the EU’s macroprudential oversight body, in response to the global financial crisis. I have contributed to its work for the past 13 years, so I feel very at home here.

In 2009 the de Larosière Group recommended the establishment of an EU-level body with a mandate to oversee risks in the financial system as a whole, going beyond the supervision of individual firms.

The global financial crisis, followed by the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, clearly demonstrated both the potential severity and the long-lasting costs of financial crises – and the importance of preventing them (Slide 2).

Estimates put the median fiscal cost of a banking crisis at around 7% of GDP for advanced economies. And fiscal costs capture only part of the damage. Financial crises can also lead to broader and persistent losses in output, employment and investment, not least because they weaken confidence.

After 15 years, however, the global regulatory reforms introduced to limit this fallout from crises are increasingly being called into question.