So the only thing that remains rather difficult to understand is the former hegemon’s efforts to resolve what is, for it, the awkward situation of non-compliance with and infringement of the rules of the club (including its own infringements) by creating new and ostensibly better rules for the same club with the same members. Yes, Otmar Issing, for instance, rightly warns against Eurobonds and simple fiscal unification, but with the European Stability Mechanism and the planned banking union we are effectively creating something like common fiscal liabilities and common bonds, just with less transparency. Arguably, the German mark was – from a monetary point of view – a rather well administered pan-European public good. After the euro, this public good became overconsumed. Philipp  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Bagus, sitting today here in this room, argues that the euro is a classical example of a “tragedy of the commons” from the start, and that the smaller and weaker countries therefore inevitably ended up racing to make maximum use of the commons for their own benefit at the expense of the rest, thereby destroying this shared asset. The German mark can indeed be viewed as a sort of public good that became the subject of decisions made outside the public sphere in Germany and hence was fundamentally transformed. The average quality of the public good called monetary stability and good currency in the eurozone will very probably go down with the ultimate demise of the former European monetary hegemon.

Second, we can explore together how to develop a green financial market ecosystem. Chongqing and Singapore have been working with our financial institutions to raise awareness of green financing amongst Chinese corporates. Chinese corporates which want to issue green bonds can avail themselves of MAS' grant schemes to help defray the additional costs of third-party verification when issuing green bonds in Singapore. Chongqing and Singapore can do more to simplify the application process for qualified companies in the Western Region to raise sustainable finance overseas. This can leverage on the trials that Chongqing and Chengdu have done earlier this year to facilitate such issuance. Third, we can do more together to align our green taxonomies. ASEAN has embarked on developing a taxonomy to define sustainable and transition activities in six focus sectors as a start. China has also developed a taxonomy. China and ASEAN can work towards greater inter-operability across their taxonomies, especially for transition activities. This will help attract greater cross-border green financing to the region. Fourth, we can explore together innovative structures to help scale up transition financing for the ASEAN region. This includes financing structures that blend finance from the public sector, private sector and multilateral development banks to de-risk and fund projects that would otherwise be unable to attract pure commercial funding. In short, there is much that Chongqing and Singapore can potentially do together in the green finance space. Let me wish all participants a fruitful Summit, with good exchanges of insights and new opportunities for collaboration.