As to central banking, these areas are related to certain instruments that are already part of our policy menu and are here to stay. I will briefly refer to three of them. The first is intervention in the exchange market.
The uncertainties are greater for the Eurosystem than for other central banks, given the additional uncertainties associated with EMU. The transition to monetary union has changed the behaviour of economic agents, partly because the differences in interest rates that used to exist between the countries of the euro area have almost disappeared.