mario draghi : central bank communication opinion piece by mr mario draghi, president of the european central bank, of the edited transcript of his speech at the pr manager of the year award ( 15 july 2014 ), published in handelsblatt, 4 august 2014. * * * today, central bank communication is right at the heart of monetary policy. it is actually a monetary policy tool in itself. even for those with little interest in central banking, it is difficult to avoid the pronouncements of one or other of us in the newspaper. those people may even end up reading the articles, if only because central bank communication can have a major impact on financial markets – and hence on their savings. central bank communication was not always so extensive. think back to the days when the most important central bank in the world – the federal reserve ( fed ) – would not even publish its interest rate decisions ; rather, it would let the outside world derive them from the market reaction. today, this sounds unbelievable. but it was only in 1994 that the fed decided to make its interest rate decisions public in real time. designed between 1994 and 1998, the european central bank ( ecb ) was born at the start of a new era for central banking. two developments during this period raised the importance of communication. first, the increasing independence of central banks made it more important to communicate with and be accountable to the public. second, against a backdrop of liberalising financial markets, the effectiveness of monetary policy became more and more dependent on steering expectations of future interest rate policy. in the first case, the main challenge for the ecb was to reconcile three attributes of central banks that do not immediately fit together : being very powerful and independent yet unelected. the best example of a country that had done this successfully was germany. its answer was to uphold the deutsche bundesbank ’ s independence but to constrain its powers within a narrow mandate. and the contours of that mandate were not set by the central bank itself, but by legislators, who themselves were democratically elected. this model has worked because, by sticking closely to its mandate, the bundesbank has gained the trust of the people. it has cultivated this trust by actively communicating the rationale for its mandate and its plans to achieve it. this inspired the ecb ’ s founding fathers to give the ecb an equally clear and narrow mandate oriented towards price stability. and we have established trust by clearly communicating that mandate and

sabine lautenschlager : one year of ssm speech by ms sabine lautenschlager, member of the executive board of the european central bank, at an international conference on “ one year of ssm effective and efficient supervision in a volatile world? ”, organised by the institute of law and finance, frankfurt am main, 2 november 2015. * * * ladies and gentlemen, let me thank the organisers of this conference, and especially professor schneider, for their kind invitation. i very much welcome this opportunity to share our experience of one year single supervisory mechanism, in particular as our first year anniversary is only two days ahead of us. back in november 2014, in a speech for the start of the single supervisory mechanism ( ssm ), i compared the new system, the ssm, to an athlete at the start of his career. we only had a short period of training before going into our first competition. today, almost one year later, we have gained experience and won some contests. let me mention some figures to give you some insight into the sport we practice : the ssm directly supervises 122 banking groups. from january 2016 onwards this number will increase to 130. the balance sheets of these banks count for 25 trillion euro in assets and 82 % of the banking business done in the euro area. overall, the ecb issued more than 1. 200 supervisory decisions last year ; our planning cycle for the first year included more than 8. 000 activities. not only did we hire 1. 000 new staff members at the ecb, but we also integrated 5. 000 staff members from 26 national supervisory authorities, who were formerly responsible for supervision in their home country, into the ssm. since november 2014, the ssm is responsible for directly supervising 1200 individual banks, which until that point in time had been supervised according to 19 national interpretations of european law and according to specific national regulations, following a national supervisory tradition with varying degrees of quantitative and qualitative elements, with a historically grown reporting universe. it was a busy first year. and it was a successful first year as we made progress on many fronts. we achieved a lot regarding our main objective : we improved the resilience of 122 significant banking groups, of the 19 national banking systems, and of the european banking system as whole. the comprehensive assessment was the most publicly visible success, but many smaller and less visible steps followed and will still follow on our way to a safer and more sound banking system in