say i hate this expression of the sick man of europe. we all need a strong france. we need a competitive france and we need a france where competition lives together with solidarity. europe needs a strong france. in the euro area, growth forecasts are discouraging. the italy of matteo renzi is in recession. france is around 0. 4 %. what do you tell french people who are worried about the future? the ecb will continue to have a very expansionary monetary policy for an extended period of time until we see the rate of inflation going close to 2 % and that ’ s something that should be counted upon. but, at the same time, as i said before, proper structural policies and fiscal policies have to be in place. in france, a question comes back often : the mythical 3 % of deficit which was fixed in maastricht 22 years ago. this was in very different universe and europe. there were bis central bankers ’ speeches not 28 member states, didn ’ t go through a worldwide crisis with as much unemployment, the french people were not 65 million. will the time come for the europeans to re - evaluate, to revise the maastricht criteria that strangle them? well, i don ’ t think it would be proper for me to discuss changes in the treaty. that ’ s the task of our european legislators. but, for the ecb, it ’ s important to remind to all of us that rules are there to be respected and that ’ s the ground for trust amongst member states. these rules have been broken in the past and the result of it was not exceptional. many of our countries arrived in the financial crisis completely unprepared. what is the main danger, the main enemy of europe? well, the main enemy for europe is unemployment : youth unemployment and unemployment in general. but this is caused by a broader sentiment of lack of confidence in the future and lack of trust between member states, and we have to fight this. who? you or we? yes, for all of us. all of us have to fight against this lack of confidence, against this lack of trust. are there three or four words that symbolize your ambition for europe? first is investment. private investment, but also public investment. did you say it to ms merkel? i did say so in jackson hole. not to her, but to every country that has fiscal space. but the other thing that we have to remember

stephen s poloz : making sense of markets remarks by mr stephen s poloz, governor of the bank of canada, to the canada – uk chamber of commerce, london, united kingdom, 5 november 2018. * * * introduction making sense of financial markets is supposed to be easy. stock prices, bond yields and exchange rates are all expected to behave in line with economic fundamentals. we know the reality is more complicated than that. yes, financial markets react to new information — in fact, they usually overreact. today ’ s overreaction becomes tomorrow ’ s retracement, and so on. it can be very difficult to reconcile high - frequency financial market action with slower - moving economic fundamentals. often this process of reconciliation is just a matter of time, since economic data arrive with a lag while financial markets live in the moment. but therein lies the essential problem : our view of today ’ s economic fundamentals is actually a forecast because the data have not arrived yet. if financial markets appear to diverge from those forecasted fundamentals, they may be telling us that our forecast is wrong. the fact that financial market prices are formed with the discipline that comes from putting real money on the line means that central bankers ignore them at their peril. to illustrate the difficulty, consider some of the market action we have seen in 2018. yield curves were on a flattening trend in the first half of the year, raising questions about whether they were pointing to slower economic growth ahead. at the same time, stock markets were on a steady march upward, which we would normally associate with a positive economic outlook. this fall, we have seen the reverse — higher yields and widespread stock market declines. while it may not always be possible to make sense of all this, the effort itself is generally worthwhile. today, i want to touch on some of the main points of our latest outlook, and offer some reconciliation of recent financial market action with that view. of course, there are always risks in trying to interpret what financial markets are saying. markets are not monolithic — their prices represent the average of a diverse distribution of views. moreover, markets evolve over time. still, we glean what we can from markets and use the information to cross - validate the signs we see in the economy. the economic outlook let us discuss the economic outlook briefly. the big picture is that the world has made considerable progress in shaking off the effects of the 2007 – 08