Opening remarks by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at a roundtable discussion on “Chain Reaction: Navigating Geoeconomic Shifts and Dependencies” at the Munich Security Conference, Germany

Munich, 14 February 2026

It is a mark of how much our world has changed that a central banker speaks at the Munich Security Conference on supply chains.

A decade ago, this would have seemed like a category error. Today, everyone in this room recognises that trade is as much a security issue as an economic one.

Economic interdependence has deepened substantially in recent decades, creating intricate webs of cross-border trade flows. Where this was once seen as a source of stability, it is now a source of vulnerability: to global disruptions like the pandemic and to deliberate weaponisation of dependencies.

Eurosystem staff have mapped products that are hard to diversify and difficult to substitute – and we can stress test the implications of suddenly cutting off supply.

Our analysis…