Welcome address by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the ECB Conference on Monetary Policy: bridging science and practice

Frankfurt am Main, 4 October 2023

It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the 2023 ECB Conference on Monetary Policy.

The last few years have been an incredibly challenging time for monetary policymakers around the world.

We have faced a succession of overlapping supply and demand shocks that have created a complex and fast-changing macroeconomic landscape.

And as a result, we have seen a paradigm shift in monetary policymaking.

Where central banks in advanced economies once wrestled with overcoming the lower bound on interest rates, they have more recently been engaging in the fastest hiking cycle on record.

But policymaking, by nature, operates in real time. We make decisions based on the best analysis and data at hand. However, it is exactly when rapid shifts in the macroeconomic environment occur that prior, unforeseen knowledge gaps are suddenly…