 Yesterday we had a very important and very, very interesting session on the future of the Euro and that's why I'm delighted now to yield the floor to Nicholas Verron, the senior fellow both based in Brussels and Washington DC and Nicholas. What can you tell us about the state and particularly international role of the Euro? Yes, thank you. First I have to apologize because I wasn't there yesterday so I hope my remarks will echo or bring a complementary perspective. The Euro has a bad press and generally panels about the Euro are about all the problems. There is a reason why there is this bad press because the crisis has been very long and protracted. It has been through, depending on where you put the starting point, about a decade of crisis in the Eurozone and very bad policy reactions at several critical points, so a litany of errors, especially in the first few years of the crisis. It also has a bad press for other reasons. There is another reason which is a form of confirmation bias. In academia, a lot of observers of the Euro have spent the 90s saying the project wouldn't fly. It wouldn't take off. When it did take off, there was a sense of frustration so there is a temptation for some of the observers to say, you know, I told you so. And let's face it, there are also political interests at stake. Policy and strength is welcomed by some geopolitical actors. It's not welcomed by others and therefore the success or failure of the Euro becomes part of this more broader international political game. What I would like to emphasize very briefly is that the story of the Eurozone crisis is certainly a story of policy mistakes and learning, frankly, but it's also a story of survival. And let's remember mid-2012, which I think was the most critical moment of the whole sequence of crisis, even so by many aspects, the Greek crisis of 2015 was more colorful. But in mid-2012, even the most level-headed observers could not take it for granted that the Euro would not break up. And we came probably pretty close to that moment of break up. And at the crucial moment of the decision, which for me was the European summit of late June 2012, the Eurozone countries decided to hang together rather than hang separately and I view that as the turning point of the entire sequence of crisis. So as even Krastev, the political philosopher has mentioned, the fact that the Eurozone has survived creates legitimacy just out of the sheer act of survival. People trust more a construct which has demonstrated its ability to withstand crisis even with mistakes. But it's not only that, so basically survival creates legitimacy as of itself, but it's not only that. The Eurozone construct is now much stronger than it was at the beginning of the crisis. There are two main differences. One is the creation of the European stability mechanism, which is a kind of big pot of money, about 500 billion euro, which is far from negligible in lending capacity. So that's pretty easy to understand. The other thing which is slightly more complicated and more of a halfway house is the banking union, but that makes also a big difference. Those who remember the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty, remember that banking supervision was very actively discussed at the time of Maastricht and in the end it was ruled out because it was considered politically impossible. So from this perspective, the establishment of the banking union is a single supervisor mechanism centered at the European Central Bank, which means that all the financial system in the Eurozone eventually comes under a single point of oversight, or at least the banking system, which is the vast majority of the system. That is really a big gap being plugged compared with the initial discussion of the creation of the euro. Now, of course, the counterargument is Italy. Look at Italy, it's a disaster, the Eurozone crisis is not resolved, nothing has changed. I would like to take the counterpoint of that view and to say that the current developments in Italy demonstrate precisely how stronger the Eurozone is now compared to previous points of the crisis, and the first indicator of that, and I speak under the control of Josep Borrell, is that there is no contagion. The spreads on Spain have not risen because of the rise of spreads on Italian debt. There has been a bit of rise in Spanish spreads in the recent weeks, but for Spanish reasons, and more generally you don't see the kind of patterns of correlation and contagion that were the rule in previous stages of the crisis. Then indeed, if you compare the Italian government now with the Greek government three years ago, or three and a half years ago, which is a natural benchmark, there was a Greek government who was constantly tying with the threat of exit and the possibility of exit. For all the idiosyncrasies of the current Italian government, that's not the case. The Italian leaders in their rhetoric, and I would argue also in their actions, are effectively committed to doing a lot of things that I wouldn't necessarily advise, but staying in the Eurozone. That's a huge difference. Basically, what I would say about Italy is to paraphrase the poet that Italy has 99 problems, but your exit ain't one of them. Strength of the Eurozone is also observable in the restarting of the cycle of accession. Bulgaria has entered a formal process of accession. This is likely to be the case of Croatia and Romania pretty soon. Even outside of Eurozone accession, there is a new process of joining the banking union without joining the Eurozone, which is probably going to be decided by Denmark in the next two years, and possibly later on by Sweden. Basically you have the coming together of the EU 27, assuming, of course, which I do, that there is no second referendum and the UK exits the EU as planned, and probably on time, then you have a greater coincidence between the Eurozone, the banking union, and the European unions, and has been the case until now. I don't expect all EU countries to adopt the Euro, for example Poland, Hungary are probably not going to adopt the Euro under the current leadership, but you have an even greater dominance of the Eurozone and banking union in the EU construct, which I think is also quite important. So what about the international role? In his speech distributed outside, Thierry de Montbriand mentioned the fact that the international role of the dollar is probably going to come to an end eventually. Is the Euro going to be a substitute? That's an old debate. People like Jean-Pierre Zaniferi, who is in the room, have contributed to that from a very long ago, and it is pretty clear that the European Union is not ready to take the kind of leadership that comes with exorbitant privilege, as Valérie Giscard has put it famously, of being the world's dominant currency. Iran is going to be a testing ground of the ability to conduct transactions outside of the dollar zone and outside of the control of the US. It's not just a currency issue. It's certainly not a swift issue. So it's too early to tell, and it depends on what attitudes the US administration will take next month. So I won't comment too much on this, but I will simply say that if the Eurozone, the single most critical element for future international leadership of the Euro, is its ability to finish the job of building a single powerful financial system out of the 19 or 27, depending how you count individual financial systems that we had before the crisis. So completing the banking union, building a genuine capital markets union, this is what will make or break the international role of the Euro going forward. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nicolas, for giving us an overview of the international role of the Euro, which you argue is actually contrary to what some might believe is actually quite strong because it has already braced the worst crisis that we had in 2012 and is now prepared for the future currency that, if I understand you, is here to stay.