17 April 2012

Mario Draghi: Statistics to deliver price stability and mitigate systemic risk

The financial crisis has dramatically increased the need for very timely granular data. And it has led to a rethinking of a number of organisational and conceptual aspects in statistics. To give just one example, the traditional monetary statistics derived from individual banks’ balance sheets are insufficient to gather information on financial groups that operate across borders and through non-bank subsidiaries. This is because the monetary statistics cover only the euro area and do not focus on the various kinds of risk to which banks are exposed and the adequacy of their capital in view of these risks. This means that it is vital to collect data consolidated at the level of banking groups or insurance groups.

Some of these data are already available at the national level for micro-supervisory purposes, but they are not always comparable across countries. The ECB, the ESRB and the three new European supervisory authorities (ESAs) are all working to fill remaining data gaps and to meet the challenge of timely, frequent and high-quality data for their macro-prudential functions.

In recent years, significant steps have been taken to identify the data gaps and to fill them by gathering more and more detailed quantitative information. But we are just at the beginning of this process, and Mr Draghi said he knows that statisticians are all too well aware of the fact that the data perimeter may change again in the future.

Mr Draghi concluded that producing high-quality statistics on the financial sector remains a core task of a central bank. It is a central input not only for decision-making processes but also for the communication of decisions, and thus, for the credibility of actions. In light of these challenges, the central bank statisticians of the future will have to serve both areas – the pursuit of price stability as well as the support of financial stability.

Full speech

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