Welcome address by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at 10th ECB Annual Research Conference joint with Stanford’s Hoover Institution on ‘The Next Financial Crisis?’

Frankfurt am Main, 17 September 2025

It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the ECB Annual Research Conference, a flagship event that brings together researchers from academia and central banks with policymakers.

This year’s conference, organised jointly with the Hoover Institution, bears a provocative title, “The Next Financial Crisis?”. The question mark, of course, is deliberate. It signals inquiry rather than prediction, and it frames our goal for the next two days, which is to examine how we can safeguard financial stability in an era of rapid transformation.

We must keep two points in mind when thinking about this topic. First, throughout the post-war era, the global financial system has been in constant transformation – and the pace has only accelerated with advances in technology. And second,…