oh and thank you all for coming to what
is clearly a star-studded panel tonight
and my name today actually sorry my name
is Gabrielle Steinhauser I'm across
London for the wall street journal in
Brussels and I'm very very pleased to
have this great panel today to discuss
this very very important question of
future of the European monetary union am
as a journalist who covers this very
very closely I will say that it has been
rather frustrating in the last few
months because nothing seems to be
really moving a few years ago we were
talking quite in detail about some very
exciting concepts for the eurozone such
as its own budget its own finance
minister and all these ideas seem to
have kind of stepped into the background
and I'm really hoping that today here
with this panel we can give a new
impetus to the debate and I've asked
everybody to be as provocative as
possible so I'm really excited for some
new ideas and on the panel today we have
with us the European Commission's vice
president for the euro valdis
dombrovskis and at the Slovak the Slovak
deputy prime minister and finance
minister peter Kazmir who I as a
brussels-based journalist will say
always makes the best comments on the
doorstep lots of lots of loves lots of
great quotes he has a high profile in
Europe I will I will tell you that next
to him we have the Austrian finance
minister and Hans you're telling who
also makes us very happy on the doorstep
very often so thank you for that and
then finally we have the Maltese finance
minister ski glue nuh who I sometimes
call dr. doom because he has been known
to make some rather gloomy SH statements
but hopefully we'll find some positive
ideas from him today and then finally
going to involve who's the head of the
brugal think tank in Brussels which is
turning ten years
this year and we're very pleased to have
him he's always one of the great and
thoughtful voices on this and now I will
ask the vice president to take the floor
and deliver his keynote address and then
we will come back to the panel thank you
so good afternoon everybody honorable
Deputy Prime Minister honorable
ministers excellencies ladies and
gentlemen first of all I would like to
thank for this invitation and for a
possibility to participate in a toddler
summit and to address issue of deepening
economic and monetary union Europe has
gone through serious financial and
economic crisis recently but it must be
say that euro area is emerging from this
crisis more resilient and there are a
number of things we are having now which
we were not having just five years ago
in terms of euro area's ability to
withstand financial and economic shocks
so we have strengths and EU economic and
budgetary rules we hell now we now
coordinate our policies throughout the
year within the framework of European
semester and this was something which
was largely absent before the crisis
there were stability and growth pact
unfortunately many countries were not
following the rules of stability and
growth pact and not much happened as a
consequence so now we really have much
more robust fiscal and macro economic
governance framework we also have an
effective financial backstop european
stability mechanism to help euro area
countries in financial difficulty and we
have a banking Union to stabilize our
banking sector and to ensure that
taxpayers are not first in line to pay
for the mistakes in a banking sector
and the European Central Bank is using
its monetary policy tools to the full
potential just to give one example it
was famous Mario Draghi's whatever it
takes which help to stop financial
instability in a euro area and whatever
it takes was referring to the outright
monetary transactions so European
Central Bank's commitment to purchase
member states bonds in a secondary
market in unlimited quantities if
necessary and several months ago
European Court of Justice actually
confirmed all tried monetary
transactions being in line with the ECB
mandate and actually we saw a more
resilient euro area during the recent
crisis in Greece unlike the situation in
2010-2011 there was no domino effect and
despite the very turbulent and very
difficult negotiations there were very
few spillover effects to other euro area
countries and the stability of the euro
area was not in question then to come
back to come to the question of economic
developments we are now seeing Europe's
economy growing in fact just some
minutes ago european commission
published its autumn economic forecast
showing that we continue to help modest
economic recovery but this a curry is
gradually strengthening in boss euro
area and in EU 28 but as this growth is
to extend backed by temporary factors
such as low energy prices low euro
exchange rate which is helping us
exporters and ECB's accommodative
monetary policy including
to do easing and the recovery is still
vulnerable to external shocks so we now
must use as a time which we help do to
those temporary positive factors we must
use this time wisely to reform the
structure of our economies as also Mario
Draghi has outlined that you cannot
solve structural problems in the economy
only with monetary policy tools and we
need to go further and to make the final
steps to make economic and monetary
union more durable more stable and to
ensure that its lives up to its
potential so the report of the five
presidents presidents of the five EU
institutions on the completing say mu
shows the way it presents a vision and
the role model for completing the
economic and monetary union by 2025 and
it underlines the need for economic and
social convergence this means bringing
and economic and social levels across
Europe closer together and closer to the
best performers so to have a convergence
towards the top not race to the bottom
and with convergence we mean convergence
both within and between or among member
states so progress needs to be done in
parallel on four fronts first towards
the generating economic union that
ensures that each economy has a
structural features to prosper within
the EMU second towards financial union
to increase the risk sharing with the
private sector complete banking Union
and accelerate capital markets union
search towards fiscal union to deliver
both fiscal sustainability and fiscal
stabilization and first word stronger
political union including stronger
democratic accountability legitimacy and
institutional strengthening it's an
ambitious project it's do not happen
overnight but we can make progress
already
II know two weeks ago European
Commission put forward a package of
initiatives that can be taken within the
existing treaty and within existing
legal basis something what we call
deepening by doing and we see these
initiatives as a stepping stones towards
the second stage for a more far-reaching
measures to complete the email so now
let me mention the most important
initiatives on economic governance we
proposed to improve the rules and
mechanisms we helped put together in
recent years to look at economic policy
as a matter of common European concern
and in particular the European semester
so we aim to better integrate the euro
area and the national dimension in the
European semester and to do so with more
transparency and blessed complexity we
will put more emphasis on social and
employment developments including by
involving EU and national social
partners even more in decision-making
and will promote convergence by
benchmarking and pursuing best practices
the Phi president report recognizes the
increasingly important role of
competitiveness in our economies the
crisis revealed underlying problems of
competitiveness and deep economic
macroeconomic imbalances in your area
countries without the possibility to
adjust currency exchange rates in
individual euro area countries proper
adjustment mechanisms are needed to
identify and address complete
competitiveness challenges early on
where therefore proposing national
competitiveness boards to be set up in
euro area member states so it would be
independent bodies which would track for
example how wages costs and other
competitiveness factors developed within
member states on the fiscal side we will
continue applying the existing rules
created by the six pack and two pack but
we need to do more to ensure full
transparency we are therefore setting a
new European fiscal board five high
level experts will work in full
independence to provide advice on the
implementation of fiscal
rules and contribute to greater
transparency at the same time we need to
increase democratic legitimacy and
accountability we will work more closely
with national parliaments social
partners and others and we will engage
with the European Parliament in
democratic debates on shared priorities
it is equally important to ensure that
our voice is strong and the global stage
it will make sense to consolidate our
position and to hell unified stance
internationally so we've proposed to
gradually develop a unified
representation of the euro area in the
International Monetary Fund we propose
that the president of the Eurogroup
should ultimately represents the euro
area internationally finally in a short
time we have created banking unions that
underpins confidence in our banks and
safeguards financial stability but we
need to finish what we have started in
fact a particular we help to implement
what has been agreed so far the bank
resolution and recovery directive and
the deposit guarantee scheme directive
we need to reach an agreement on the
bridge financing on the single fund
which comes into force at the beginning
of the next year and we plan to move
towards European Deposit Insurance
Scheme building on a mechanism of
reinsurance and we want to continue to
reduce risks in European banking system
the Commission will present legislative
proposals on deposit insurance before
the end of the year and at the end of
the day people have to be confident that
their savings are safe regardless in we
were in Europe their bank is located all
the measures I have set out can be
worked on right now but at some point we
will need a more far-reaching measures
to complete the EMU some requiring
treaty change in spring 2017 the
Commission will set out concrete ideas
to fully complete mu but reflections on
the second stage of completing m you
must start now and we want to consult
broadly gathering ideas from across
Europe because our main challenge is to
shape
census for these more fundamental steps
not only among governments but also
among Europe's citizens ladies and
gentlemen a successful economic and
monetary union is in the interest of all
EU member states and it is in the
interest of all member states that we
can deepen EMU so we do not create new
barriers towards member states that
shall not that have not yet joined the
euro the European Commission is
committed to keeping the process of
deepening EMU transparent and respecting
the integrity of the EU internal market
and I personally want to the ones that
completing EMU will make the euro I even
more attractive currency also for those
member states that so far how not joined
in thank you very much and I'm looking
forward for the discussion thank you