Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the 28th meeting of Francophone Central Bank Governors, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Phnom Penh, 28 May 2026

“I want the bank to be in the hands of the government enough, but not too much.”

Napoleon Bonaparte said these words six years after founding the Banque de France, just as he was tightening his grip on the institution.^[1] Two centuries later, these words still capture a tension that sits at the heart of our profession.

To best serve the public interest, a central bank must be close enough to the state – but independent enough to resist the pressures of the moment.

The 1970s taught us a great deal about this. The “great inflation” of that decade was not caused by a lack of independence, but by oil shocks and by the difficulty of interpreting supply shocks, for which central banks were unprepared.

But the empirical work that followed pointed to one clear and robust finding: countries with less independent central banks…