 Good afternoon to everybody. First of all, I have a series of people to thank for, first of all, the students. I would like to congratulate you to reach for reaching the final stage of the Generation Neuros students award competition. Well done. You should be very, very proud of what you have achieved. But there is also a second group as important that I would like to thank. Without them, you wouldn't be here. So I'd like to express a special thank to your teachers. I'm sure you would all agree about their dedication and the guidance played an important role in helping you win in this competition. So dear teachers, thank you. Thank you all heartily for not only teaching, but also igniting the passion in your students, nurturing their interest and curiosity in Europe. The third set of people I need to thank is the families and the friends. You're probably following us live on a webcast. And your support has been crucial to your students' success. So today, we have many reasons to celebrate. First of all, we have Europe Day reminds us of the Schumann Declaration of 9th of May, 1950, which proposed the pooling of coal and steel industries and led to the first European community. Now today looks like something that's not important. If you go back until in 1950, it was three years after the end of the Second World War. And coal and steel were the basic components of all the armaments and the weapon industry. And they've been considered one of the major parts of the strength of a nation, both in the first and the Second World War. So the declaration to put all these key resources together is really a landmark in our history. Now this eighth edition of the Generation Euro Students Award also coincides with the 20th anniversary of the euro. Our single currency is the most visible form of European integration, one that citizens encounter every day. The euro has brought us 20 years of price stability contributing to prosperity and growth. As I said many times, this is unquestionable, but there are things that need to be finished, completed, done better than we have done so far. Today we also celebrate you and your fellow young Europeans. You are the first generation that grew up with our single currency. And you are also the future of Europe. I mean, the ones who say, I want to return, you are people who just, what would you do when you hear people say, I want to return to the old currencies? You just laugh. That's the only thing you would think you do, and I would join you by the way. We cannot ignore that European integration is becoming more contested today. There are many who feel that Europe has not fully delivered on its promise. Youth unemployment, social inequality, and demographic changes are serious challenges which we can only address together. Ensuring prosperity and stability over the long term can only be done jointly by the citizens of Europe working together. So for this, we need you. This requires everyone, including young people, to get involved in debates and speak up for what you believe in. The student protests on climate action are one example of how you can make your voice heard. And other ways, by taking part in the forthcoming European elections with your vote, you can shape the future of Europe. And don't have any doubt about that. We are interested in what you say. It's important for us at ECB to listen to what you have to say through initiatives like this one, our online competitions, and youth dialogues. We engage with young people all over Europe. And I will listen to you. So let's open now our discussion. Thank you. So welcome back after our first session yesterday. And I would like to start the ball rolling with the president. We will answer your questions. And so I'd like to invite Konstantinos Kutsubas from the BIMSEM School in Belgium to ask the first question over here. You want to get a bike? Do you think the ECB is independent enough or should we abandon that idea? No, I think the ECB is independent enough. I think we've shown this on all throughout its existence, I think since the very beginning. And the issue is why should central banks be independent? That is a good question because it's not been like that before. It's only relatively recently that central banks are independent. It started, I would say, a general movement towards independence of central banks takes place in the late part of the 1990s of last century. There were cases of independence like the Bundesbank, which were rooted in the previous experience in the 70s. And it was since the beginning of the Bundesbank's existence. But others were not. And it's only after the experience of the 70s that the high inflation rates combined with the high unemployment rates that central bank independence becomes a cornerstone of modern economic policymaking. And the reason is that you see, well, we have to be careful there. Central banks are independent because independence is crucial for the credibility of the monetary policy they run. But independence has to be carefully circumscribed because central banks are a combination of things that prima facie looks kind of strange because they are independent. They are very powerful and they are not elected. So how do you square this? And the way to reconcile these three aspects of central banking is that they are independent within a mandate, which in our case is price stability. And the mandate is defined by the ones who are elected, namely the legislators. And that's how we square independence, power, and accountability. So the underlying content, the underlying meaning of this is that basically central banks are not independent as far as the mandate is concerned. But they are independent in the ways, the tools, the instruments they use to pursue this mandate. I move on to question two now. We have the next question from Felix Stingel from the Hans-Seil-Gennasium in Germany. Hello. My name is Felix Stingel from the German team Casualation. And dear Mr. President, Harvard professor Paul Tucker said, national central banks should not only talk to financial markets, even though they are important. It is also important to talk to the general public, to explain to them what inflation and deflation means and why it is necessary to guarantee financial stability. People must understand the role of national central banks. Therefore, you have to explain it again and again. So dear Mr. President, what is your opinion on this topic? Now, of course, I agree. And if you look at how communication, central bank communication has evolved over the last 20 years, you can see that there is a constant effort to be transparent, to explain things better. Just think about that in the mid-90s, so about 20, little more than 20 years ago, there was one central bank, the very important central bank, where interest rates were changed and nothing was said. Nobody knew about that. Markets had to infer from the behavior of prices that the central bank had changed interest rates. Just to tell you how things have changed now, we have press conferences, press statements, speeches, occasions of public encounter in the European Parliament here, a continuous flow of communication. So things have changed considerably. And the language has been used, it's changed also. It's not a longer, it's not a time any longer when governors could actually pride themselves on not being understood. That was another point of communication 30 years ago. When governors listen, if you have understood me, I think you must be wrong. There was something said along this line. So things have changed. But there is one caveat that I would like to throw into this. Markets should not speak only to, sorry, central banks should not only speak to markets and banks or bankers, should also speak to other people, true. But one has to be extremely careful, because as soon as one addresses other people, and it should do so, it should do in a very careful way, because one risks to get into the political arena. The natural audience of the politics is the people. So the central banker has to be careful in the way addresses the people who are not markets or banks. Thank you. And I'd like to move on to the next question, to ask Marta Laurado from El Colegio Mare de Luz del Ángeles in Spain to ask the next question. Good afternoon. The latest ECV survey of professional forecasters revealed don't worse revision to inflation expectations to 1.5% in 2020 and 1.6% in 2021. Is it possible that the ECV's inflation target is not a reflection of the current economic situation? The real question is, therefore, is the ECV considering any kind of realignment of the inflation target? Thank you. Well, that's a question I've been asked. The first time was something like five or six years ago. And this question has been asked whether it means that we should raise our inflation target or lower our inflation target. And the two have different meanings, of course. If we've been asked to raise our inflation target, because the argument was, if you do so, inflation expectations will also adjust to a higher inflation. And therefore, the actual inflation will also go up. Now, of course, if you raise inflation when you are not even able to reach what the target of inflation is, this may kind of lack of little credibility. The other question or the other suggestion was that since it's been so long that we never reach the close but below 2%, why don't you lower inflation to something lower and you accept defeat? And that's exactly why we are not doing it, because we don't accept defeat. But also, there is also another reason. If we accept a lower rate of inflation, what happens is that implicitly, we raise the real rate of interest. You know the real rate of interest, the nominal rate minus the expected interest rate, the expected inflation rate. So if we lower the expected inflation rate, we raise real rates, and this will produce a contractionary and negative effect on the economy. So there are good reasons, but more generally, one doesn't change the objective when encounters difficulties in reaching it. As I said before, the first problem with that is that any action on the front would lack credibility. But let me also add that in fact, all our research shows that there is still a link between inflation expectations and the state of the economy. This link has been changed, certainly, over the last 10 years for a variety of reasons, first and foremost, the very long, almost unprecedented crisis. This has produced a series of behaviors that led people, one of which was massive unemployment, poverty, fall in demand, and has led people to think that prices would never go up again. So there are lots of reasons why inflation expectations are now reacting, and therefore, actual inflation as well, are now reacting more slowly to the changing economic conditions. But what happened is that we, of course, like to say that it's mostly because of our monetary policy, over the last five, six years, about 10 million jobs have been created in the eurozone. And if I'm not mistaken, never in the history of this part of the world so many jobs being created in such a short time. And with the jobs also, and with the gradual tightness of the labor market, what happened also that pressure on nominal wages is going up. So the now nominal wages compensation per employee, negotiated wages, these are all different definitions, some of them are above their historical standard. Still, we don't see yet the feedback or the transmission of these higher nominal wages growth into a higher inflation. It's taking longer. Right now, one of the reasons is that profit margins are being compressed. And we know that it's a matter of being patient and persistent with the accommodative monetary policy, and it will come, it will happen. We now have a question from Florin Ioannò Gerardi from the Instituto di Instruzione Superiore Baruffi in Italy. Buongiorno, Presidente. Buongiorno. What could be the consequences of a hard Brexit as the ECB already put measures in place to help it deal with such a scenario? Let me answer this way. There are different parts of the economy that a hard Brexit may affect. Let's first look at the aggregate data. If we look at the aggregate for the real part of the economy, all in all, the size of the UK interchange with the eurozone is relatively contained with respect to the overall size of the eurozone. However, there are two sets of observations one has to make. The first is that there are certain countries that are unquestionably going to be more affected than others because the interchange with the UK is much higher than the rest of the eurozone. So how these economies are going to be affected by a hard Brexit and how this will reverberate on the rest of the eurozone is one thing that we have to watch carefully. The second thing is more complex and very, very difficult to watch. The modern production process is very fragmented. In other words, the same product that we buy in a store is often being produced in many different parts, each little component is being produced in different parts. This is typical for the car industry, but it's also one would see it for any product right now. Nowadays, the specialization has become so important. And so a hard Brexit, meaning a sudden interruption of trade flows would affect all these different points of production. We call them value chains in a way that it's very, very difficult to observe. Now on the financial side, which is the aspect that has received most of the attention so far, in the last several months we've run preparation and works jointly with the Bank of England examining all the areas where we could have unforeseen events. And there are basically two sets of situations, one in which the action by the public authorities is needed to hamper, to avoid, to eliminate potential disruption and situations where it's the markets that have to adjust there. It's the private sector that has to adjust their various contracts to take into account the new reality. The first part has been addressed quite effectively, I believe, by the European Commission together with the UK Treasury in basically telling, in simple words, telling people, look, for the situations that are complex, don't worry. You're going to have a one-year time to adjust. And this has been a big, big important game-changer that the European Commission did about two or three months ago, maybe four. On the private market preparation for that, we have the impression that private markets still don't, at least, don't believe fully in the possibility of a hard Brexit. And so they are kind of slow in adjusting the contractual terms or other parts of their contracts as if a hard Brexit were to take place. So with their continuous messages to the markets that they should speed up and so on. So that's what I can answer now. The situation would certainly become complex. And therefore, we're all ready and hopeful that no disruption will follow as far as our angle, the financial part. Thank you. And I would now like to invite Katarina Auer from Haile-Ve Browno in Austria to ask her question. Well, what are your plans for the future when your term of office comes to an end? And what will you remember most from your presidency? Thank you. Thank you. Well, I don't know. Frankly, the answer to the first question, it's true. I'm not trying to avoid the question. It's just I don't know. First of all, I still have six months to go. And I'm fully taken up by the job. And I made no plans whatsoever for the future. So we'll see. Now, what do I remember most? It's been a very, as you may imagine, a quite interesting time. So there are many, many things that I may remember of this experience. Certainly, one thing that comes to mind comes to your mind as well. It's been the time when in 2012 when the interest rates were skyrocketing and the spreads were booming about everywhere in the eurozone. And frankly, there were lots of people, especially I would say not in the eurozone, but outside the eurozone, who were actually thinking that the euro was dead. Then all of a sudden there was a change. There was a change, a big change in that year, in the last part of the year. And that was due essentially, in my memory at least, to one factor which the markets completely underestimated, namely a very important European council in the early June which created the banking union. Markets paid no attention to that. And as if it were something they were so discouraged about the future of the euro that they thought, oh, it's another of those political meetings, which was indeed, but it actually produced important results. And again, markets underplayed that, underestimated that, showed the political commitment of our leaders to the euro. All these people in the world thought the euro was a technocratic experience. What that council and the subsequent actions by our leaders have shown is that it's not only a technocratic experience, first and primarily it's a political experience in which a whole generation, more than one generation of leaders, have invested all their political capital. The rest was market action by the ECB, but it's much less important. All right, then let's continue with the next question from Margarita Simões from the Collegio de Santo André in Portugal. Good afternoon. How is it possible to apply a single monetary policy across the euro zone when the social and economic situations in the 19 countries vary? Sorry. Well, that's a really difficult question. It's at the heart of the monetary union. When, as you probably all of you know, the monetary union is based on an article by a Nobel Prize economist, Robert Mandel, who wrote an article in the 60s, I believe in the early 60s. Yeah, I think so, entitled, Optimal Currency Areas, where he defined what an optimal currency area is. It's not the 60s, it's the early 60s. OK, thanks. And he listed certain features. When the euro was created, it's quite clear the euro zone was not yet an optimal currency area. Many things were there, where in place other things had to be created. Until this process is finished, we'll have to accept the fact that countries are going to differ between them, not only because their initial conditions are different, but also because there are less mechanisms that would make them more homogeneous than one might wish in an optimal currency area. That's why it's so important to proceed, to continue with completing the projects that we've started, namely completing the banking union, create a capital markets union, start thinking about a fiscal policy or fiscal stance for the euro area. But to do these things, you need trust between members because members are different. And in order to put things in common, like all of us, they have to trust each other. To trust each other, members have to show that they are able to run economic policies that will strengthen their productive basis. That they make, we call, we use this word called structural reforms. But structural reforms basically mean to become stronger. And they are not easy. And each country has its own agenda, of course. They're not the same everywhere. So it's a complex process where this trust is gradually built upon action. And at the same time, we have to complete the projects we have in place. So our next question comes from Andre Mochris from the team in Slovakia. Hello. I would like to ask whether there is a place for cryptocurrencies or the blockchain technology in the future financial market and whether the traditional financial institutions like the ECB aren't afraid of its potential. Thank you. Well, the answer is it's going to be a very small place, if any, at all. The point is that cryptocurrencies or bitcoins or anything like that are not really currencies or assets. A euro is a euro. Today, tomorrow, in a month, it's always a euro. And the ECB is behind the euro. Who's behind the cryptocurrencies? And so they are very, very risky assets, the value of which oscillates, as you've seen, widely. At this point in time, they are not significant enough in their entity that they could affect our economies in a macro way. And so we tend to consider them as speculative assets, highly risky, but as far as the rest is concerned, it's not really something that pertains to the central bank, the task of monitoring and regulating, possibly, this. It's more, what I would say, more something that falls within the consumer's protection competence, where you want to make sure that people who buy into these assets know what they do and are aware of the risk they run. Completely different thing is the digital ledger technologies and another technologies development, digital developments, which, in a sense, may change the relationship between central bank citizens and savings and banking system and so on. These developments, we monitor them carefully. There are people who work on that all over the world. But that's different from cryptocurrencies. And we'll move on to the last question. I'd like to invite Nick Smertjoz from the team representing Slovenia to ask the last question. Dear Mr. President, with the rise of Euro skepticism, many people assume that the Euro represents something bad and that it is responsible for the rising prices of goods and services in countries that have adopted the Euro, including Slovenia. What can the ECB do as an institution to bring the Euro closer to the citizens of member states that are about to adopt the Euro? Thank you. Thank you. I'll answer quickly to the last part of the question, which is the ECB should stick with its mandate. And that's it. The other point is whether the Euro has been bad in the ex- it's true. In the experience of many countries, joining the Euro has caused an increase in prices. Now, there are many causes for that. But in fact, in terms of if we look back and examine the inflation, the overall inflation, not individual prices. We don't see, actually, a big jump in inflation. We see jumps in individual prices. In the past, I don't know about the case of Slovenia, it's quite clear that in the past, in some specific countries, these increases in prices were due to the kind of awkward or mistaken way in which the conversion from the old currencies to the new currency had taken place. There were specific administrative bureaucratic failures at that time. But this really doesn't explain this overall stance. By the way, when we talk about the stance that people have towards the Euro, we have to acknowledge two things. First is that there is an overwhelming support for the Euro today. I think it's the historical maximum now. If I'm not mistaken, it's between 72% to 76% of the people are supporting the Euro. So if that is so, you ask yourself, then, why I hear so many people that are not happy with the Euro? Well, part of this depends on the fact that we hear only the ones who are unhappy. And the happy ones don't need to restate their case every day. But there has been, I just read yesterday, about an interesting research that's been published by the Bank of France. I don't see anybody from that bank today. But oh, OK, good. That says something quite interesting and subtle. Most people are in support of the Euro. But they're also convinced that the Euro did more for the other countries than it did for its own countries. In other words, the grass of your neighbor is always greener than yours. And we certainly can work on that, again, pursuing our mandate with time. And also, I'm convinced that many of these social phenomena that are being signaled in the various polls we run depend on the unprecedented crisis we are just out now. And as the memory of this crisis will fade away, we hope also these sort of uneasiness will also disappear. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you to all of you who have been watching us on the webcast. And more than anything, thank you for your questions. And we will now finish with the Q&A part and move over to the official award ceremony. So while I get to the lectern. So we go upstairs here? Yes, we'll go upstairs. And I'll be introducing everyone. And I apologize already.