Banking supervision

The ninth entry is sistemicamente relevante, and it is the one line on this page an English reader should refuse to render word for word. Relevante in Portuguese carries two loads at once. It means pertinent, bearing on the matter — a informação relevante para a decisão — and it also means important, of weight, worth noticing: um facto relevante, uma diferença relevante. « Relevant » in English kept only the first of those. It says that a thing belongs to the question in hand and says nothing whatever about size, so a remark can be entirely relevant and entirely trivial, and « the relevant authority » is merely the one that happens to apply. A bank called « systemically relevant » has therefore been described as pertinent to the system, which is true of every bank alive. The term the rules use is « systemically important », and the institutions themselves are « global systemically important banks ». Where Portuguese leans on relevante for weight, English has to reach for « important », « significant » or « material » — and it is the last of the three that the accounts prefer.