klaus liebscher : finance and modernisation welcome address by dr klaus liebscher, governor of the austrian national bank, at the annual conference of the european association for banking and financial history ( eabh ), vienna, 20 may 2005. * * * ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to welcome you all on the occasion of the annual conference of the european association for banking and financial history in vienna. and let me add that i am highly honoured to have been elected to the board of management of your distinguished association this morning. vienna was chosen as this year ’ s conference location and hosted by ba - ca, because creditanstalt was founded 150 years ago. as you may know, we celebrate a number of other important anniversaries in 2005. we commemorate the end of world war ii and the re - establishment of the republic of austria 60 years ago, the signing of the austrian state treaty 50 years ago and austria ’ s accession to the european union 10 years ago. i am convinced that this year of commemoration is a good opportunity for historians to remind people of what history has to tell them. it is an old wisdom that we have to repeat history if we do not draw lessons from it. this is true for big politics, but equally true for the development of the various subsectors of society and of the economy. finance and banking are no exemptions to this experience, much to the contrary, but i would like to stress that ignoring the lessons of history is not the rule in the financial community. let me mention two or three examples from the area of central banking policymaking. in numerous cases, historical evidence has shown that a hasty liberalization of financial markets nearly always leads to financial crises, whose macro - economic costs are sometimes extremely high. learning from the generalized mistakes of other countries, financial market liberalization in austria followed a step - by - step approach and relied on the experience of others to set the “ right ” sequence of measures. today austria serves as a case in point of good practices in this respect, as a good historic example for other countries. with respect to exchange rate and price stability, austria learned its lessons from own mistakes made in the past as you will hear from two presentations on episodes of austrian central banking history this afternoon. therefore, i would like to point to the fact that after the breakdown of the bretton woods system the so - called “ hard currency ” - policy the oesterreichische nationalbank (

andreas ittner : accounting is all about trust speech given by mr andreas ittner, vice governor of the central bank of the republic of austria, at the fifth ecb conference on accounting, financial reporting and corporate governance for central banks, frankfurt am main, 21 june 2016. * * * ladies and gentlemen, at a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely. bearing these words of william somerset maugham in mind, i will do my best to neither bore you with technical stuff, nor to spoil your appetite with too wise remarks. but if i may just stay with that quote for a moment : shakespeare lovers among you may have recognized that it is a paraphrase of a speech by othello, in which he describes himself as “ one that lov ’ d not wisely but too well ”. his tragedy is that he allows his reading of reality to be coloured by jealousy ( and iago ’ s deceit ), which destroys his trust in his wife ’ s love and fidelity. i hope you won ’ t find it too heroic a leap from here to the observation that the financial markets in which central banks, commercial banks and other players operate are crucially dependent on trust. trust in the basic integrity of the institutions and corporations that make up the market, in the rules by which they play, and in the information that they disclose to the market. 1. central banks so let me start with some thoughts about the evolution of central banking and the importance of financial reporting in this process. central banks have always been confronted with changing in economic and legal conditions in their activity. these changes are often the result of crisis and the danger of financial and economic collapse. permit me, in its 200th anniversary year, to cite the example of the austrian central bank, one of the oldest central banks in europe, which was created in a crisis situation after the long years of the napoleonic wars to stabilize the troubled economic and financial situation of the austrian empire, and in particular to restore trust in the national currency. public trust in the national currency was the starting point for the need to publish financial statements of the austrian central bank. our bank was founded after the napoleonic wars and the congress of vienna in june 1816, as a better trusted agent and intermediate with commercial banks after the austrian - empire had issued paper money on a grand scale. the first monthly financial statements were published in 1848 ( so called revolution year in austria and much of