mario draghi : statistics to deliver price stability and mitigate systemic risk speech by mr mario draghi, president of the european central bank, at the sixth ecb statistics conference, frankfurt am main, 17 april 2012. * * * ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the executive board i would like to welcome you to our sixth biennial european central bank ( ecb ) statistics conference. i am very pleased to see that the event has once more attracted many distinguished participants. let me take the opportunity to share with you some thoughts on the topics on the agenda. as policy - makers in the fields of monetary policy and financial stability, we are deeply dependent on the work being done to maintain a stream of timely, relevant and reliable data. today and tomorrow you will have the opportunity to discuss ways of further strengthening the information basis for the fulfilment of the mandates given to the ecb and the european systemic risk board ( esrb ). key challenges the financial crisis has dramatically increased the need for very timely granular data. and it has led to a rethinking of a number of organisational and conceptual aspects in statistics. to give just one example, the traditional monetary statistics derived from individual banks ’ balance sheets are insufficient to gather information on financial groups that operate across borders and through non - bank subsidiaries. this is because the monetary statistics cover only the euro area and do not focus on the various kinds of risk to which banks are exposed and the adequacy of their capital in view of these risks. this means that it is vital to collect data consolidated at the level of banking groups or insurance groups. some of these data are already available at the national level for micro - supervisory purposes, but they are not always comparable across countries. the ecb, the esrb and the three new european supervisory authorities ( esas ) are all working to fill remaining data gaps and to meet the challenge of timely, frequent and high - quality data for their macro - prudential functions. moreover, there is an increasing need to consider measures of dispersion not just averages, and to consider micro data as well as macro aggregates. for financial stability purposes, in particular, a wider variety of granular data and indicators are needed, and more emphasis needs to be put on data “ outliers ” and so - called “ tail risks ”. as we have learned, systemic risk may stem from any part of the financial system, including the shadow banking sector. that is why we

the economy, characterized among other things by demography. professor tobin stated in his conclusion that, thirty - five years after keynes, welfare macroeconomics associated with unemployment and inflation was still a relevant and challenging subject. at the same time, he sounded reasonably optimistic about future policy wisdom that would better address these problems. he was half - right. inflation has not been a serious problem in advanced sohei kaihatsu and jouchi nakajima, “ has trend inflation shifted? : an empirical analysis with a regimeswitching model, ” bank of japan working paper series, no. 15 - e - 3, 2015. bis central bankers ’ speeches economies for many years now. nevertheless, growth and job creation are not satisfactory. on top of that, the risk of deflation is a new element that now requires serious consideration, while it was not on the list of concerns in the 1970s. no matter how difficult the problems may seem, however, i believe that the right policies, with strong determination, will ultimately prevail. i hope that we can be even more optimistic after this conference, with a deeper understanding of this subject, and still greater conviction that we are already heading in the right direction. thank you. bis central bankers ’ speeches