' s " foreign minister ". and time and again, you faced the same challenge. is it better to kick the problem down the road by striking a quick compromise, even if it is bound to come back and haunt you, sooner or later? or is it better to resolve the issue once and for all? you were always passionate about reaching a stability - driven, long - term solution – like during germany ’ s presidency of the g7 in 2015, when you played a pivotal role in ensuring that credible standards for total loss - absorbing capacity ( tlac ) were ultimately in place for systemically important banks. your instinctive ability to read a situation and your negotiating skills were a gift that kept on giving for the bundesbank, including within the eurosystem. when you were the board member responsible for the directorate general statistics, for example, there was the matter of whether the bundesbank would play an active role in running the system in which securities in europe are kept on a security - by - security basis. it was you who convinced the ecb to run the system jointly with the bundesbank, and that was a good outcome. you were also the bundesbank ’ s voice when it came to explaining the particular architecture of the euro area or the bank ’ s viewpoints to the world. and you did this in your speeches, for example, which you held with remarkable frequency. you ’ re a record - breaker, mr dombret, and not just because of all the air miles you have clocked up. our research has found that there wasn ’ t a single central banker in the euro area or the united states who came close to holding as many speeches as you did over the past four years – you could say that ’ s dedication verging on missionary zeal. but there ’ s more. you also made the most of every single trip abroad to engage in dialogue – with colleagues from central banks, with government representatives, diplomats, executives at commercial banks and sometimes students at colleges as well. and what is more, you always kept the door to your network open for your colleagues from the bundesbank so that they could also tap your valuable contacts. for long periods, you managed your directorates general by blackberry – and almost half of our 16 directorates general passed through your responsibility at one point or another during your term of office. this way of working meant that your units had to be meticulous and focus on what really counts :

that said, anyone who could condense an issue into not much more than two blackberry pages stood a good chance of getting a quick decision from you. but you weren ’ t just fast, you were also far - sighted. just take the establishment of the ssm, when you showed your flair for intuition. to maximise the bundesbank ’ s contribution to european banking supervision, you made sure that the bank ’ s supervisors in the joint supervisory teams belonged to central office in organisational terms but continued to be deployed out in the field. 2 / 6 bis central bankers'speeches that was instrumental in tapping synergies and, at the same time, heeding the personal needs of the supervisors affected. it was less mr dombret ’ s quick reactions and more his stamina as a negotiator that was called for when it came to the topic of basel iii. the finalisation of basel iii at the end of last year was very much to your credit – and with unilateralism raising its head again, getting the united states under president donald trump on board for this global financial accord was a major achievement. not once during the negotiations did you lose sight of what made europe ’ s banking system special. and yet at the same time, you always negotiated with a view to striking a deal – not just in order to put an end to regulatory uncertainty for the banks, but also so as not to impair the basel process and the multilateral approach. you didn ’ t negotiate in a vacuum, but always had a keen eye for the ramifications. in the remarkable round of negotiations in santiago, you sent photos of the latest status of negotiations to your team in the banking supervision unit, so that you could receive simulations and impact studies in return almost in real time. the agreement which the basel committee finally reached, eleven years on from the onset of the financial crisis, was another major lesson learned from the crisis. there ’ s one debate you set in motion, though, which you will have to pass on, unresolved, to your successor, and that is the subject of proportionality. you were one of the first to speak out against placing too much of an administrative burden on the small institutions operating within their domestic markets – but you also said that regulators would not go easy on their capital requirements. and you were also quick to put the profitability of german financial institutions in the face of the persistent low - interest - rate environment on the agenda. the