jean - claude trichet : interview with the wall street journal interview by mr jean - claude trichet, president of the european central bank, with the wall street journal, conducted by messrs brian blackstone and matthew karnitschnig, published on 27 january 2010. * * * question : as davos approaches, what are your thoughts on where the global economy has come in the last year, what risks have receded and if there are any new risks that you see? mr. trichet : to me davos is 2007, 2008, 2009 and now 2010. in early 2007 it was before the start of the financial turbulences i said publicly that my colleagues and i were warning against an under - assessment of the quantity of risks and an under - pricing on the unit of risk in global finance. in early 2008 we were in a situation which was obviously very demanding because we were experiencing the turbulences which had started since august 2007 and we had to take already some unconventional measures. we had not yet to cope with the dramatic intensification of the crisis, namely the post - lehman situation. in early 2009, in davos last year, we were coping with the most demanding situation since more than 60 years. the financial crisis had turned into an economic free fall with the grave and immediate threat of having a depression which could have been as grave as 1929. this free fall lasted two full quarters : q4 of 2008 and q1 of 2009. we have avoided, thanks to the measures we took, the materialization of the depression. at this davos meeting, we have a unique occasion to compare notes because you have here the private sector, both financial and non - financial, as well as the public authorities, the executive branches, members of parliaments, central banks, coming from both, the industrialized and the emerging world. comparing notes to better understand why the system the financial system was unacceptably fragile and to see together how to make the global economy much more resilient. question : when you look at the current situation, where are the greatest risks in europe and globally? mr. trichet : we are now experiencing a modest recovery in europe. and, we all have to make the financial system much more resilient in the medium - and long - term with a management of the transition that would permit not to hamper the present recovery. in any case we cannot afford to be twice in such a dramatic situation at the global level. i trust

57 percent share of all four - year undergraduate degrees. for black women, the gap is even bigger : they accounted for 1. 5 percent of undergraduate economics degrees compared with a 6. 2 percent share of all undergraduate degrees. 3 a growing body of research and evidence makes clear that the quality of the economics profession and its contribution to society will be greater when a broader range of people are engaged. 4 research shows that greater diversity results in better outcomes — it broadens the range of ideas and perspectives brought to bear on solving problems, and it brings important insights to the analysis of our economy. as amanda bayer and cecilia rouse have documented, microeconomic experiments and other research demonstrate the benefits of diversity for group deliberations and decisionmaking. for instance, one well - known experiment found that racially diverse groups of students outperformed other groups in solving problems, and another found similar benefits from gender diversity. 5 turning to my own institution, it is notable that when the congress established the federal reserve system, it took great care to ensure there would be a diversity of perspectives around the decisionmaking table in terms of regional representation. that is why we have 12 reserve 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches bank districts represented on the federal open market committee. but we have not lived up to that standard on other dimensions of diversity. for instance, it was not until 2017, more than 100 years after the creation of the federal reserve, that the first african american, raphael bostic, was chosen to lead a reserve bank. we need to do better than that, and we will continue our efforts until the group of people around that table is more like america. to achieve our goals, we will need to improve the diversity of the economics ecosystem more broadly. of course, the federal reserve system hires people with all kinds of expertise — from lawyers to law enforcement, from financial analysts to data scientists. but our footprint is especially large in the economics job market, where as a system we routinely hire one of every 25 newly minted economics ph. d.'s each year. in short, we have a significant stake in the diversity and vibrancy of the economics profession overall. why consider a career in economics? i have discussed why it is important for the federal reserve and for our economy to see more women of color embracing the field of economics. but what ’ s in it for you? there are many ways your career may unfold where economics might fit in it. some of you may decide your