ECB: Financial stabilisation improves, crisis not over

The vice president of the European Central Bank (ECB) said Monday that the financial stabilization in the euro zone improved but the crisis is not over yet. Vitor Constancio made the remarks while speaking at the presentation of the European Commission's 2013 report on European financial stability and integration and the ECB's 2014 report on Financial integration in Europe here. He said people had "turned a corner" and stabilized the situation. "It is an important achievement but it is not the end of the road as it is too soon to declare that the crisis is over," he said. According to Constancio, both reports illustrated that "steady, albeit uneven, progress is being made towards financial stabilization." "Given where we stood barely two years ago -- on the edge of redenomination risks -- such progress is encouraging," he said. Solutions adopted on the global and European levels including the Single Supervisory Mechanism and a Single Resolution Framework have been put in place, Constancio said. However, the euro area still faces large challenges in terms of lackluster growth, excessive unemployment, remaining fragmentation and a low inflation period that threaten to aggravate the burden of the debt overhang still besetting governments and private economic agents, he added. Constancio believed that some banks in the euro area contributed to the sovereign debt crisis. "The banking union must be instrumental in resolving the crisis," he said. He sees macro-prudential policy as particularly important for euro because macro-prudential tools can in principle allow policy makers to address financial imbalances in a more country-specific and granular way.