the results of their decision is that our organisations have been facilitating the inspire2live conferences for twelve years now – with a two - year interruption due to covida second parallel between my world and yours, dear guests, is also quite obvious. i'm looking at an international company of highly trained professionals, who cooperate 1 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches across several borders to serve a societal goal. like your work, our work also has a societal goal and requires international cooperation. we share insights, raise questions and engage in debate with our colleagues from the eurozone, and on a wider scale with those from the worldbank, the imf and many other international organisations. and like you, we prefer to debate on the basis of evidence. scientific evidence. just like cancer research is the most fruitful when it can profit from cooperation of many researchers like you, from all over the world, just so our mission of stable financial institutions and sustainable welfare profits from international scientific cooperation. these parallels in your and our work, make me feel slightly less overwhelmed, standing in this stately hall filled with so many eminent academics. a third parallel is related to the substance of our work, of your work and mine. this is the parallel i would like to turn into the main subject of this opening speech. your subject of study - the treatment and prevention of cancer - has an economic value in addition to its intrinsic value. a healthy economy benefits from a healthy population. the past two years we have seen that the reverse is also true : a population suffering from a pandemic will suffer from economic consequences - not that i expect that you are eager to listen to a professor of economics telling you that your work is essential'because of its economic value'- your work is intrinsically essential of course. and here i would again like to thank you all, for your collective and unbridled commitment to global healthcare. with this speech i would like to try to substantiate this'thank you '. 3. why and how does a central bank take health into account? our core task as a central bank is – as i mentioned earlier - to contribute to financial stability and sustainable welfare for all dutch citizens. although there obviously is a relationship between economy and health, we must admit we cannot quantify or clearly specify this. but we did learn some things from the pandemic. central banks and other institutions have found a way of dealing with uncertainties by developing alternative economic scenarios.

and inflation expectations. and so, the ecb ’ s current baseline scenario is consistent with ending the pepp in march 2022. this does not, however, mean the end of loose monetary policy. based on the current outlook, the ecb ’ s monetary policy intention is to keep rates at their current or lower levels until we see a durable convergence of inflation, also in our forecasts. and this may imply moderate inflation rates above 2 % for some time – although i don ’ t think it would be proportional to use asset purchases to actively strive for such an overshoot. however, the eurosystem ’ s presence in financial markets will remain substantial with the large reinvestments under both the pepp and the asset purchase programme – the app. we will continue to run net asset purchases under the app for as long as necessary. while we are currently thinking about options to ease the transition out of the pepp, incoming data should clarify how the risks surrounding our current inflation the pepp, incoming data should clarify how the risks surrounding our current inflation baseline will play out. now to wrap up. i talked a lot about the uncertainty underlying the inflation outlook. today, on october 14th 2021, i can only make an educated guess what the actual inflation will be one year from now, on october 14th 2022. but even when uncertainty is a part of economics – the part that humbles us – central banks will not let this uncertainty undermine trust. trust in the financial system. trust in the way out of this crisis. trust in our trade. thank you.