January 2009
Trichet: ‘Banks will not forget that their job is to lend’
Trichet’s balancing act
‘Let’s stick to the rules’
More on Jean-Claude Trichet
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"We call upon the top management of the commercial banks to take these decisions into account and recognize that they are operating in an environment in which a lot of the fundamental risks to liquidity and solvency have been addressed" |
At what specific moment did you realize that we were in a financial crisis of unprecedented magnitude?
On August 9 2007 we were the first central bank to identify that we were starting to see a hugely turbulent period as a consequence of abnormal behaviour in financial markets. That day we lent €95 billion for 24 hours to the market at a fixed rate.
Before this, we had said publicly already back in 2006 – as did other central banks – that global financial markets were under-assessing the quantity of risk and...
