past 13 years. • the first lesson is that our policy responses need to be holistic. in the heat of the battle, the right mix of fiscal, monetary and financial policies is needed. all of them need to play their part. interactions between them are important, as in earlier crises. • the second lesson is that within this holistic approach, fiscal policy must be in the lead in order to minimize scarring of our production capacity. it is important that the fiscal stimulus is not prematurely withdrawn but rather remains geared towards supporting ailing businesses. it may even have to be scaled up to buffer the effect of the renewed containment measures. timely and correct use of the next generation eu recovery package can and will play an important role in this respect as well. • the third lesson is that monetary authorities have to stand ready to act and contribute to tackling any escalation of the corona crisis. but beyond that, there are limits to what monetary policy can achieve. • with renewed fears about a resurgent corona pandemic and renewed restrictions imposed to contain it, aggregate demand is inelastic with respect to financing conditions. in such a situation, it would seem more fruitful to directly focus on financing conditions to ensure that demand can display its full elasticity once no longer constrained. the best that monetary policy can then do in support of the economic outlook, is to continue to neutralize the tightening effect that the pandemic would otherwise have on the highly accommodative financial conditions that were already in place pre - corona. • we have announced that at our december meeting we will recalibrate our monetary instruments. this will also include a reflection on the efficiency of the use of these instruments, with a view to providing effective support for the euro area economy. • the fourth and last lesson is that for the post - crisis recovery phase in the euro area, growth - enhancing structural reforms are key, because they attack problems at their roots. the inevitable but unprecedented fiscal spending will raise public deficits and debts substantially. future generations can only bear and redress such debt burdens if simultaneously structural measures are taken to protect the public investments needed to boost potential growth. • and with this, let me conclude.

upcoming energy transition, as agreed upon by more than 190 countries in paris in december 2015, as one of our economy ’ s key long - term challenges. in the report we urged our government to pursue a plausible and practicable path towards a carbon - neutral economy, as such a long - term view enables households and businesses to gradually adjust their investments, preventing excessive misallocation. and we also decided to take a closer look into climate risks for the dutch financial sector as part of our supervisory mandate. ii. risks : a thematic review of climate risks in the dutch financial sector which brings me to the second part of this speech. what are the risks that we see as a supervisor in the dutch financial sector? in 2017 we conducted a thematic review on this issue. in this review we took a deep dive into four topics : - climate - related damages for the insurance industry - risks for the financial sector from a potential flood - risks from the financing of carbon intensive assets, so called ‘ brown finance ’ - risks from the financing of assets and projects that are meant to contribute to the energy transition, so called ‘ green finance ’. today i want to share with you some key findings for banks, regarding the risks for brown and green finance. in terms of brown finance, one of the things we wanted to do was get an understanding of the size of the risks. how big of a risk is the energy transition for our banking sector? as a first step, we wanted to measure how exposed our financial industry is to sectors that need significant reforms to become carbon neutral. sectors such as fossil fuel producers, the utilities industry, heavy industry, agriculture and transportation. this wasn ’ t something that we could easily get from our supervisory data. which is why we welcome the work that the commission will do on developing a taxonomy for the sustainability of financial assets as part of their sustainable finance action plan. for our research, however we had to develop our own template for our financial sector to fill out. we sent this template to the three biggest banks, covering around 70 - 80 % of the market. what we found is that banks ’ balance sheet consist of around 11 % of exposures to carbon intensive industries. not surprisingly, most of these exposures are through loans, which makes banks less sensitive to market fluctuations than for example pension funds. moreover, most of these loans have maturities of less than five years, which should provide banks with sufficient scope to anticipate changes. especially if the transition is more