Another EU enthusiast is taking over Germany's all-in-one financial regulator.

Felix Hufeld, currently Chief Executive Director of insurance supervision, is to become the new president of the BaFin. He will take over from Dr Elke König at the beginning of March. Dr König will be moving to Brussels to help set up and head the EU’s so-called Single Resolution Board.

Since the 1930s, 'resolution' has been the word that describes what the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation does when a bank it has insured fails. FDIC bank supervisors determine that the bank’s assets are worth less than its liabilities, then the bank itself is shut down and its assets are transferred to a new entity controlled by the FDIC. The word 'resolution' seems to have the same meaning in the jargon of the European Union, i.e the winding-up of institutions.

Hufeld has been the head of insurance supervision at BaFin since January 2013. He is also chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) and a member of the management board and the board of supervisors of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA). No stauncher supporter of the European Union could be found.

His female predecessor, Dr Elke König, recently said that the European Union's Single Supervisory Mechanism’s standards of supervision made sense, but added that the standardisation of regulation and supervision must not degenerate into a 'levelling down' process - in other words, rigorous German practices must prevail over sloppy east and south European ones. The European Central Bank is leading this centralising initiative and the idea is to give the ECB specific supervisory and rule-making powers over credit institutions in Euroland. The SSM is open to the participation of other EU countries that wish to join, but none does.

National regulators are to retain some functions under the new regime, but the ECB will directly supervise banks with assets of more than €30 billion, banks that earn at least 20% of their home country's GDP or banks that have asked for or received direct public financial assistance from the EU.

Once the SSM is up and running, the ECB will be responsible for the supervision of all 6000 banks of the euro area. The decline in the number of banks in the EU has been noticeable in recent years - in 2013 the figure was 152 banks and other lenders, according to the ECB.

König, and presumably Hufeld as well, believe that the EU's Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) will make EU-wide 'banking union' complete and make the winding-up of systemically important banks more orderly as well. König likes the idea of Euroland having a highly centralised 'resolution' regime but she has also called for a global one. The idea of British taxpayers stumping up for failures at Brazilian banks might strike some as a trifle odd; Hufeld's opinion on the matter is not known.