go of traditions that have been honed over decades. culture is a sticky thing. but national authorities should embrace the european idea. and they should seize the opportunity to contribute to a new, common supervisory culture. they should let more of their staff come to the ecb, for a while at least. let them work in a european environment and carry this culture back to their home countries. 1 / 2 bis central bankers'speeches and the idea of a european supervisory culture should be reflected in how we deal with banks. for example, national reporting requirements should be dropped ; instead, we should aim for a single european reporting framework. to sum up : a common supervisory culture is emerging, but it still needs to be nurtured and nudged. thank you for your attention. 2 / 2 bis central bankers'speeches

the central bank if its price stability mandate is threatened by too low inflation or even the risk of deflation. the ecb is, however, not the only central bank faced with this problem ( slide 11 ). the equilibrium interest rate has been falling across large parts of the industrialised world since the early 1970s. what is behind this negative global trend? one important driver is the fall in long - term trend growth. this is determined by the amount of resources – labour and capital – used and by how efficiently those resources are used, as reflected by productivity. and, indeed, all of these sources of growth have followed a declining trend in many advanced economies. while annual productivity growth in the euro area in the 1980s was, on average, still around 2 %, today it is somewhat less than half of that ( slide 12, left - hand side ). and the working - age population in the euro area has for some time even been in decline. demographic developments mean that this decline is highly likely to continue in the coming decades ( slide 12, right - hand side ). in addition, in recent decades, the leading industrial nations have undergone massive structural change, owing not least to digitalisation, and have been moving away from capital - intensive manufacturing industries towards less capital - intensive service industries. low interest rate environment requires unconventional monetary policy measures a key conclusion that can be drawn on the basis of this analysis is that it is not primarily the central bank that is responsible for low interest rates. it is not within the power of the central bank to change the structural conditions that would turn around the negative interest rate trend. the call for higher interest rates should instead be directed at governments and legislators, combined with the urgent demand for measures to strengthen the growth potential of our economies. a second conclusion is that these developments have an impact on the toolbox of central banks. in order to maintain price stability, central banks around the world had to resort to a number of unconventional instruments in order to bring inflation back to a level that is consistent with their mediumterm inflation aim. the ecb, for its part, turned to unconventional measures when very low and later negative inflation rates took hold in the euro area and inflation expectations noticeably weakened ( slide 13, left - hand side ). but unconventional measures were not restricted to negative interest rates. in addition, these included guidance on the future stance of monetary policy – known in technical jargon as “ forward guidance ” –, targeted longer - term refinancing operations