based mif will have to be phased out for both the sdd and for legacy direct debits at both national and cross - border levels. different models can be conceived or are already in use for covering costs and providing incentives for those involved in offering and using direct debits. if this compensation is based on a proper calculation and methodology, it should also be acceptable to the competition authorities. unfortunately, public perception of the problems faced by the sdd has deflected attention away from the considerable achievement that the design of sepa direct debit represents. for the first time, customers will have access to a direct debit instrument that can be used not only at the national level, but also on a pan - european level. banks, csms ( clearing and settlement mechanisms ) and it providers have launched pilot projects for the sepa direct debit, and i am convinced that sdd will bring great benefits to its users in 2009. do you sepa for cards? the sepa for cards scheme started officially on 1 january 2008. however, although several individual card schemes have adapted their rules to sepa requirements, sepa for cards is difficult to perceive and is even invisible to merchants and cardholders. this is mainly owing to the fact that the epc did not create a scheme for card payments, but rather a framework, which owing to its more general nature, leaves some room for interpretation. the eurosystem has repeatedly voiced its expectation that the banking industry will set up at least one additional european card scheme. at the moment, i know that several projects are underway on one or more european card schemes, and i hope that they will soon release their prototypes to the public. for the interlinking of existing schemes, a degree of determination is required to move beyond an interim solution towards a long - term merging of the schemes. as with sepa direct debit, the main obstacle to the work towards a european card solution seems to be the gridlock regarding the future of the multilateral interchange fee. to bring sepa for cards to fruition, it is necessary to surmount these obstacles, as national card schemes are at risk of extinction, and competition might decrease to a duopoly of international schemes with similar business models. again, discussion of these obstacles should not divert attention away from the great benefits that sepa for cards will bring to banks, merchants and cardholders. better security standards, more choice and higher acceptance levels will be an incentive to increase card usage

, a possible way forward is to implement measures to enhance risk - sharing between core and periphery countries. as the ecb has repeatedly indicated, the stability and growth pact should remain the anchor of confidence in the sustainability of public finances. nevertheless, a further sharing of sovereignty over economic policy making is necessary to strengthen both discipline and solidarity within emu. further steps from common rules towards common institutions will be discussed in the upcoming report by the euro summit on the future of economic governance. in addition, pursuing structural reforms aimed at increasing the overall efficiency of financial intermediation, and thus eliminating asymmetries in financial friction, will greatly contribute to reduce the pro - cyclicality of capital flows and the magnitude of fiscal imbalances4 as illustrated by jaccard and smets ( 2014 ). financial markets and the macroeconomy the research agenda on the interaction between the real economy and financial markets has become extremely important in light of the recent global financial crisis and european sovereign debt crisis. in his keynote speech, the nobel laureate christopher a. sims will focus on expanding an empirical structural vector autoregressive model with structural identifying restrictions to jointly model financial and macro variables allowing for nonlinearities. nonlinearities can be allowed in shock volatility and the transmission of those shocks through the economy. in this context, he will consider novel identifying restrictions. see e. g. justiniano et al. ( 2014 ). see e. g. gilchrist et al. ( 2014 ). see e. g. jaccard and smets ( 2014 ). bis central bankers ’ speeches results from these estimated models provide crucial empirical evidence to complement insights from structural economic models. the growing literature on structural models to study macro - financial relationships includes, at this stage, fully articulated nonlinear models that are solved with global methods, as well as markov - switching dsge models to capture the sort of dynamics that underscored the 2008 – 9 financial crisis. recent papers make key contributions to incorporating financial instability in macroeconomic theory, featuring, for instance, credit constraints, endogenous risk taking and regime changes, bank defaults and imbalances on banks ’ assets or liabilities. an important extension is to incorporate risk premia and to allow them to vary with the state of the economy, in order to draw conclusions on the risk aversion of agents in the economy as in the model by swanson ( 2014 ). 5 such a model can be used to assess the effects of policy