under certain conditions. more generally, maintaining our high stock of assets until the third step of our sequence gives us through our reinvestments more leeway on the markets. conclusion as of 2006, olivier blanchard said : “ monetary policy can pretend to be close to science if it can be conducted using simple and robust rules [ … ] monetary policy must be closer to art if it is frequently confronted to new, poorly anticipated and poorly understood, contingencies. ” this mix of science and art is something i like in monetary policy. therefore, i have cherished our discussions in the governing council, for my past seven years as governor : if it wasn ’ t for discussion, why should we have meetings? but as i suggested in my remarks today, you can trust us around president christine lagarde to make pragmatically the right decisions in the right order and timing, in order to reach our course : bringing inflation back firmly and durably to around our 2 % target. i thank you for your attention. 5 / 5 bis central bankers'speeches

pace instead of a quarterly one, and app purchases could therefore end in q3, at some point to be discussed. in parallel, another way to enhance optionality could be to remove the word “ shortly ” from the forward guidance on asset purchases. this would be a possibility to break the quasi automatic temporal link between the two instruments whilst retaining the sequencing. optionality would mean that the lift - off could possibly take more time, if warranted. this temporal decoupling could give more scope for fine - tuning, which is an advantage in uncertain times. rather than forcing ourselves to act on both instruments almost simultaneously ( which could fuel fears of an excessively brutal effect ), we could give ourselves more time and consider the latest inflation outlook before deciding about the calendar of rate hikes : a decision that anyway we don ’ t need to make before our june meeting. any speculation about this calendar of future lift - off is at this stage premature. the forward guidance on interest rates let me stress here an important semantic point about our monetary stance : the steps i am discussing here are about the normalization of our monetary policy, not about tightening. it ’ s still the exit from exceptional instruments and an extremely accommodative monetary policy ( increase of the already large assets stock, negative interest rates ). it ’ s the first phase of a gradual return towards a more neutral stance, which we are still far from. tightening would be another story, going beyond a neutral stance, which is not within our present policy horizon. let me then remind you of the three state - dependent criteria on our forward guidance : “ the governing council sees ( i ) inflation reaching 2 per cent well ahead of the end of its projection horizon ; ( ii ) and durably for the rest of the projection horizon ; and ( iii ) it judges that realised progress in underlying inflation is sufficiently advanced to be consistent with inflation stabilising at two per cent over the medium term ”. today, in my personal judgement, it might be considered that the first criteria ( with a headline inflation significantly above 2 % since summer last year and expected to remain there for months ahead ), and the third one ( with underlying inflation around or above 2 % by most definitions ) are fulfilled. at this stage, according to our december forecasts, the remaining one ( about inflation remaining at or above 2 % for the rest of the projection horizon ) is not met. this could possibly change in the next quarters. however, we should