With regard to deeper political integration, I believe that the EU demonstrated in Nice that it is ready to gradually move towards strengthening the truly European element of decision-making by introducing more qualified majority voting - even though many people expected, and hoped for, greater progress on this issue.
We moved in large half percentage point increments for four months, but at this and the previous meeting, we returned to more standard quarter percentage point increases. The earlier large increases were required to move interest rates quickly away from their pandemic levels to address the rapidly emerging inflation problem.