Directives) rather than in Community secondary legislation (amendable through simpler comitology procedures).
The establishment of EMU does not seem to determine a need for revising the pillars of the current legal framework. What seems to be necessary, however, is a more flexible legislative procedure which allows for a faster and more effective revision of Community legislation, whenever needed in relation to market developments.
17. Let me now turn to the execution of banking supervision. It
should immediately be recalled that supervision, contrary to regulation, is
a national task, exercised by what the jargon of the Directives calls the
"competent authority". Since the euro area has adopted a separation
approach between supervisory and central banking functions, it is natural
to examine first the functioning of the "euro area supervisor" (i.e. the co-
operative system of national supervisors) and then turn to the tasks and
needs of the "euro area central banker" (i.e. the Eurosystem).
18. The euro area supervisor can be regarded as a rather peculiar entity composed of national agencies working in three modes: stand-alone, bilateral and multilateral. Let us briefly examine each of them.
The stand-alone mode is the one in which the supervisor exclusively operates in the national (or even local) context. Today it is by far the most predominant mode. In most cases, this approach is sufficient to achieve the objectives of banking supervision because most banks in Europe are operating in a context that does not even reach the nationwide market of the country of origin. Such a decentralised model is even more effective because it allows the efficient use of information that may not be available far from the market in which the bank operates. That is why it is actually applied even within countries. In Italy, for example, over 600 of the 900 licensed credit institutions at end-1998 were entirely supervised by the Banca d'Italia branch of the town in which the bank is licensed.
The bilateral mode involves co-operation between two supervisory
agencies. It is used for cross-border supervision of the same type of
financial institutions, such as credit institutions, or the supervision of
different types of financial institutions operating in the same market,
such as credit institutions and securities firms. The instrument that has
been devised to organise bilateral co-operation between banking supervisors
is the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). With the implementation of the
2nd Banking Co-ordination Directive, the Member States began to negotiate
extensively MoUs in order to establish the necessary co-operation between
"home" and "host country" authorities to supervise efficiently institutions
that have cross-border activities or foreign country establishments.
By the end of 1997, 78 bilateral MoUs had been signed between the EEA
banking supervisory authorities. The key aims of MoUs are to establish a
regular exchange of information between national supervisory authorities.
While the "gateways" for the exchange of information have been laid down in
Community legislation, MoUs provide a practical framework for communication
to be carried out between supervisors. Moreover, MoUs define procedures and
reciprocal commitments between pairs of EU supervisors related to the
various parts of the supervisory process, such as establishment procedures
and on-site examinations.
Finally, the multilateral mode is the one in which a group of
supervisors works collectively as, say, a single consolidated supervisor.
Such a mode is required when the problems involved are area-wide. They may
be area-wide for a number of reasons with regard to the institutions, or
groups, involved: their dimension; their linkages with a number of
different markets in various countries; the role they play in the payment
system or in other "systemic" components of the market, etc. Multilateral
co-operation can also enhance the quality of supervision by examining
common macroeconomic influences on the banking system and common trends in
the financial system that may not be revealed from the national perspective
only.
Today, the Banking Supervision Committee is the key forum for
multilateral co-operation. It is composed of representatives of the banking
supervisory authorities of the EU countries, either forming part of the
respective NCB or separate bodies. The Banking Supervision Committee's main
functions are the promotion of a smooth exchange of information between the
Eurosystem and national supervisory authorities and co-operation among EU
supervisory authorities. Another forum for dealing with the requirements of
the multilateral mode is the Groupe de Contact, a group of EU banking
supervisory authorities which, for many years, has discussed individual
banking cases in a multilateral way, but at a lower organisational level
than the high-level Banking Supervision Committee.
19. So far, the need to develop the multilateral mode has been
relatively limited, as the emergence of a single banking market in the
European Union has been slow and the euro was not yet in place. Thus, the
fact that the multilateral mode has not gone, for the moment, beyond
periodic discussions among supervisors and occasional industry-wide
analyses should not be a cause for concern.
I am convinced, however, that in the future the needs will change and the multilateral mode will have to deepen substantially. Over time such a mode will have to be structured to the point of providing the banking industry with a true and effective collective euro area supervisor. It will have to be enhanced to the full extent required for banking supervision in the euro area to be as prompt and effective as it is within a single nation.
There are no legal impediments to that. The existing legislation,
whether Community or national, permits all the necessary steps to be made.
Information can be pooled; reporting requirements and examination practices
can be developed and standardised; common databases can be created; joint
teams can be formed; and analyses of developments across the whole banking
system can be conducted. The Community legislation providing for the
unconstrained exchange of confidential information between supervisors does
not distinguish between bilateral and multilateral co-operation, but the
common interpretation is that it covers both modes. It will be the task of
the Banking Supervision Committee, for its part, to develop the
multilateral mode among EU banking supervisors.
20. If the above concerns primarily the euro area supervisor, what about the euro area central banker, i.e. the Eurosystem? The euro area central banker has neither direct responsibility for supervising banks nor for bank stability. It is, however, no stranger in this land. It has a vital interest in a stable and efficient banking industry; it is, therefore, keen to see its action complemented with an effective conduct of the supervisory functions by the competent authorities; it needs a clear and precise knowledge of the state of the euro area's banking industry as a whole and of its major individual players; and it may have a role to play, as we shall see, in the management of crises.
For the Eurosystem, natural reference models are provided by the
central banks of countries that apply the separation approach, for example:
Germany before the euro; the United Kingdom after the creation of the
Financial Services Authority; or Japan. In all these cases the central bank
has a well-developed expertise in the micro and macro-prudential field;
each distinctively plays a role in the macro-prudential field by addressing
threats to the stability of the banking system and analysing the soundness
of the structural features of the system. For their own purposes, these
central banks also have precise and comprehensive information about the
banks in their respective country. This is obtained either from performing
practical supervisory duties, as in the case of the Bank of Japan or the
Bundesbank; or from the national supervisory authority; or through direct
contacts with the banking industry, as in the case of the Bank of England.
The Banking Supervision Committee is in a good position to co-operate
with the Eurosystem in the collection of information. Indeed, the so-called
BCCI Directive has removed the legal obstacles to the transmission of
confidential information from competent supervisory authorities to "central
banks and other bodies with a similar function in their capacity as
monetary authorities". This includes national central banks and the ECB. Of
course, the provision of supervisory information is voluntary and its
development will have to be based on an agreed view of the central banking
requirements the Eurosystem will have in this field.
V. CRISIS MANAGEMENT
21. In normal circumstances central banking and prudential
supervision have an arm's length distance between them. In crisis
situations, however, they need to act closely together, often in co-
operation with other authorities as well. Charles Goodhart and Dirk
Schoenmaker have made here at the London School of Economics a valuable
contribution to analysing the handling of major banking problems in the
history of industrial countries. One of their conclusions is that, in most
instances, central banks have indeed been involved. Banking problems are so
close to monetary stability, payment system integrity and liquidity
management that this finding hardly comes as a surprise. The advent of the
euro will not, by itself, change this state of affairs.
22. When discussing crisis management, it should not be forgotten that, while central banks have a direct and unique role to play when the creation of central bank money is involved, this represents just one category of emergency action. Another category refers to the injection - by politically liable Finance Ministries - of taxpayers' money into ailing or insolvent credit institutions. There is also a third, market-based, category, consisting of the injection of private money by banks or other market participants. These three typologies of emergency action all require the involvement of policy-makers, but they must not be mixed up when evaluating the existing arrangements. Therefore, before discussing the much debated question of the lender-of-last-resort, let me briefly comment on the two, probably less controversial cases where central bankers are not the providers of extra funds.
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