But you fail to mention the most important one of all: that a central bank of any country which has only variable access to international capital markets may have a problem in acting as a lender of last resort to its banking system.

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In escaping China's financial repression, however, the city's informal lending system also ducked out of its financial safety system, including its prudential safeguards and its lender of last resort.

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Iceland and Cyprus have discovered how painful it is to have a banking system without such a deep pocket lender of last resort.

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Now the ECB needs to act more aggressively as lender of last resort, expand its balance sheet, and inject much needed liquidity into the banking system.

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