draghi : there are already limits. we have said from the beginning that our programme would be limited to the purchase of securities with short maturities. apart from that, we can only wait, we have no plan b. spiegel : now you need a successor to the outgoing ecb executive board member asmussen. the federal government has nominated sabine lautenschlager, the current vice - president of the bundesbank. what do you think of her? draghi : i have known ms lautenschlager for years and appreciate her work as supervisor. appointing the members of the governing council is a matter for the governments of the euro area. but i would welcome it very much if the vacancy could be filled by a woman. spiegel : mr draghi, thank you for this interview. bis central bankers ’ speeches

academic scribbler from a few years back ”. 5 economic theories, some of them dating back to the 1930s, 6 have helped us to incorporate financial insights tractably into our models – think of the financial accelerator, the debt deflation channel, the credit channel, the modelling of collateral - constrained and creditconstrained agents, to name but a few. therefore, saying that models had nothing to teach us about the crisis ( before or after ) is just not right. it ’ s true that we did not avoid the great recession, but if we, around the world, were able to prevent a much more damaging depression, we owe much of it to the science of economics. nevertheless, it is also true that our models did not predict the crisis and provided only limited policy guidance when it struck. can we identify their weaknesses? well, there are the usual suspects : linearity, rational expectations, complete markets, limited agent heterogeneity and financial imperfections. ex ante, these choices may be defended as reflecting the need for parsimony, logical consistency and tractability in model building ; perhaps also the view that financial crises were rare. clearly, those views need revising. certainly, structural models were not very successful at forecasting the crisis. but i ’ m not certain that there were other tools out there which did better. non - linear models are outwardly attractive – think of the strong pro - cyclical features of the current euro area crisis, such as the market impact of credit downgrades or the feedback loop between sovereign and bank creditworthiness. but they do not necessarily deliver substantive gains in real time. 7 meta models or models which markedly over - fit the data are unlikely to help policy deliberations. arguably of more importance is the better identification of those ( currently under - developed ) financial factors that matter for our short - term assessment. let me now bring the ecb ’ s experience into the discussion. i would first like to emphasise the valuable contribution that the current generation of dsge models have made to the policy - making process. the ecb has been at the frontier of developing and estimating structural models for policy analysis. models such as smets - wouters8 and the new areawide model9 ( nawm ) have played an important role in policy analysis ( for example, in policy - making under the zero lower bound for nominal interest rates and the effectiveness of keynes j. m. ( 1936 )