Ewald Nowotny, the governor of the National Bank of Austria, has expressed a number of reservations about Europe's progress towards the single supervisory mechanism (SSM).

"There is a clear need for public intervention – and somebody has to do it," Nowotny told an audience at a conference organised by the central bank. However, he mused that we may be seeing the "usual oscillation" from too much deregulation to too much re-regulation, and pointed to a few specific aspects of the SSM that could