governing council today, and i will not comment immediately on our decisions that christine lagarde has just presented. in mid - march, when the economy was threatened by a breakdown in financing, the governing council of the ecb put in place an immediate and virtually unlimited liquidity shield. on 12 march, we acted first of all for businesses and smes that obtain financing from banks, by allocating them an exceptional refinancing envelope at a very attractive rate : the tltro iii, which as of their first take up in june represented an amount of nearly eur 1, 350 billion. then, on 18 march, for large companies and governments that fund themselves through the financial markets, we created the pandemic emergency purchase programme ( pepp ), initially totalling eur 750 billion, which was increased to eur 1, 350 billion on 4 june. this massive and rapid action was welcomed but raised questions, particularly in germany : is the ecb not going beyond its mandate, endangering price stability? and even more " fundamentally ", where do these thousands of billions created all of a sudden come from? i will start with the second question : the specific feature of a central bank is its ability to create money virtually and without limits. however, it must be borne in mind that the money created by central banks is never simply “ given away ” permanently : it is loaned for a limited period ; and it is channelled into the economy and eventually comes back to the central bank. the central bank can buy time through its monetary creation, and this is important. but it cannot sustainably increase wealth ; only our work and economic growth can. i will now return to the first question, on whether or not we are fulfilling our mandate. in its founding treaties, and under the legitimacy afforded to it by economic actors and public opinion, the ecb ’ s measures are bound by two interlinked anchors : its price stability mandate and its independence. they are inherited from the bundesbank and in my view vital. independence : the ecb is subject to neither national governments, nor to the pressures of the financial markets nor of passing trends. the ecb ’ s monetary policy must continue to support economic activity, for the sake of its own mandate of price stability. in the short and medium term, the crisis will have desinflationary effects that are already noticeable, with inflation temporarily falling in august by 0. 2 % in the euro area, and by

is why we think we need to adapt our central bank money services if we are to address the settlement needs of an increasingly digital financial system. as such, the banque de france was one of the first central banks to launch an ambitious experimental programme on wholesale cbdc. the mas and the banque de france have been travelling companions on this journey for some years now, and our partnership has proved very fruitful. we have been, and continue to be, close partners working on bis innovation hub projects involving crossborder payment processes. let me just highlight a few of those projects here. in the wake of project mariana, where we tested the cross - border exchange of cbdc, we are currently working together on project rialto to improve the fx layer of instant crossborder payments. we are also exploring on - chain compliance checks for cross - border transactions with project mandala, and are collaborating, with a group of financial institutions, on the les gardiennes project, to implement a cross - border and crosscurrency repo on - chain solution for tokenised financial assets issued in public permissioned blockchain infrastructure. within the euro area, as it is likely that traditional infrastructures will coexist with new dlt systems for quite some time, i believe that the availability of central bank money, irrespective of the infrastructure used, and the interoperability within and between those infrastructures, will be crucial to preventing market fragmentation and ensuring a safe settlement process. this is why, since may 2024, the banque de france has been deeply involved in the eurosystem's ongoing exploratory work to test different interoperability solutions for the settlement of tokenised financial assets in central bank money. looking further ahead, the bis's vision of a unified ledger is promising and could start with the development of regional unified ledgers, such as a european shared ledger. building on a public - private partnership, we could thereby establish a more integrated, efficient, and resilient wholesale payment infrastructure, which could host wholesale cbdcs and private settlement assets as well as tokenised deposits in commercial bank money. this perspective lead the banque de france, as a representative of the eurosystem, to take part in bis innovation hub's project agora, in order to explore the possibilities of this type of programmable platform. 2. retail digital payments in the retail space, the digitalisation of payments offers numerous benefits for consumers