 Thank you so much. I'm quite excited to be here back at the European Central Bank. I would like to thank Oscar who has insisted that I should definitely come and visit Etory and other colleagues for inviting me to participate in this absolutely outstanding conference. I was quite impressed by the quality of the presentations and discussions during the course of today. In my own personal idiosyncratic style I will therefore talk about something else. What is it that I want to talk about? I want to talk about a theme that I have found useful to think about developments in fiscal policy and prospects around the world right now. And it goes in the form of a policy trilemma. So the start of the trilemma comes at the global level thinking that public debt, global public debt is at a record level. And if it continues in this path it will go above 100% of GDP by the end of the decade which is quite impressive for the world as a whole. We have learned that there are pressures on budgets right now and one of the important pressures comes from increases in interest rates, nominal and real and relatively weak prospects for growth. So the famous R minus G has actually adjusted upward quite significantly. At the same time the successful fiscal intervention during the pandemic with quite generous measures of support to households and corporations led to a ramping up of expectations and demands for public spending. And of course there are many structural challenges from demographics to the energy transition that are pushing, spending pressures up. And at the same time in many places there are clear restrictions on how much taxation the public will tolerate, what we call political red lines on taxation. So if you have pressures on spending, if you have binding limits on taxation and if you have risks on public debt you face a trilemma, something has to give. Either spending demands have to be scaled down, in any case taxes will have to keep up with whatever spending ambitions will be in place or otherwise public debt will be ramping up quite substantially and financial stability will become a mirage. So this is the trilemma. You cannot easily deliver on public financial stability, accommodate demands on public spending and respect political red lines on taxation. My favorite example at this point in time, the fiscal monitor actually uses climate policies to illustrate the trilemma. But my favorite example right now is the United States. In 2023 fiscal policy in the United States had a quite significant turn about with the deficit going from 3.7% of GDP in 2022 to 8.2%. I thought that you guys would enjoy listening to the decimal points. I will kind of forego decimal points in the rest of the talk. But the truly important thing is that the deficit is projected to continue at 7% of GDP as far as the eye can see. And at that level the public debt to GDP ratio will be increasing in a range of about 3% or slightly more than 3 percentage points of GDP per year until the end of the decade. And if it continues at that point in time it will be above 140% of GDP by decade end. But this is not enough in accordance with the CBO projections that were put out in the summer so they're not exactly up to date reflecting the latest developments. This trend is projected to continue and actually to accelerate until 2050. And in 2050 according to the CBO forecasts 2 thirds of the revenues in the federal budget will be allocated to that service. So this is I believe convex enough even for Olivier there. Now if you look at China you basically see that China looks a bit like the United States when it comes to the public debt to GDP trend. The only thing is that public debt actually increases faster in China at about 4 percentage point of GDP and the debt level in China public and non-financial corporate debt is extremely elevated. Okay now our view and this is actually the official view of the IMF is that both the US and China have tremendous policy space and so they can both of them adjust and control their public debt path if and when they choose to do so. And this is the point where I basically say that it is very important to understand that the rising path of debt in the world is in a sense explained by the US and China. Without the US and China the rest of the world is actually projected to have a declining public debt to GDP ratio. So let me summarize what I want you to retain from this part of the talk. Number one the trends in the US and China are very pronounced but both the US and China can control it. The world as a whole has after the pandemic a substantially higher level of debt and the projection of the debt is that it will be rising faster than what was projected pre-pandemic. Without the US and China debt is lower than without US and China but it's also declining but projected to be declining slower than pre-pandemic projections. So qualitatively the situation is slightly different. Is this prudence of the rest of the world warranted I would say absolutely and the reason I would say absolutely I get it from commercials on US TV. On occasion there is quite a spectacular ad on TV and then a voice tells you stunt performed by professional athletes don't try this at home. My point here is that if the rest of the world tries to follow the strategy which is viable for the US and China the rest of the world will hurt itself. So they should definitely not try to do it. If we think about what is going on in the world right now we see that if we add all demands on spending up we come up with huge numbers of a seven to nine percent of GDP pressures in advanced economies in emerging markets and something like 14 percent of GDP for low-income developing countries. If you look at Europe you actually see that the debt to GDP ratio is projected to come down by on average almost one percentage points of GDP per year and the primary balance is very close is projected to be very close to balance by the end of the decade. If I were to worry about the Euro area I would not be right now be worrying too much about the aggregate fiscal policy stance although of course one can always do better I would be worrying about divergences among member states and if I would want to illustrate that one could look for example at difference in interest rate projections for Germany and Italy and if one would do that one would actually see that one of the countries Germany is on the negative side of R minus G while the other Italy is on the positive side of R minus G and if you want to guess whether that is important or not you can again look at Olivier there. I could now become really serious and go to the normative implications of the situation that I described but I decided instead to give you some short rhymes and this if you want to know was produced in a context that involves chat GPT but also Antarctica and if you will want to know more about store that story will have to ask me so the rhymes go like this fiscal times now bind so tight a Trilemma in ministers site pressures on spending the man so keen social needs and dreams unseen red lines on taxes a warning sign making balance an illusive design for every choice an outcome found in the political battleground for every service for every grace a cost is born in fiscal space taxes may rise or borrowing play yet for people dues always way no deficit floats in vacuum vast it echoes back in financial cast financial stability a pillar so strong in the Trilemma dance it belongs as spending surges and taxes flat stability weak as the anchor drags happy to minister who still hopes to navigate safely without tight ropes if confident if confident the both will sound hollow if doubtful nobody will follow and now the minister thinks they come to me they beg they plead can we spend more and forget all receipts no I say all we have is an empty purse and month and mountains of debt the heaviest curse thanks for your attention