It was a pleasure for me to come here today because my acquaintanceship with Karl-Peter Schackmann-Fallis goes back more than 30 years, spans a variety of professional positions, and became a friendship very early on. Another point I’d like to make before I get on with my speech is that monetary policymakers are often compared with different types of birds.
They are often dubbed hawks or doves in an effort to visualise their particular policy stance. I dare say everyone knows that monetary policy is far too complex a topic for all the possible points of view to be reduced to just two or three avian species. What I mainly like about this imagery is the perspective: the bird’s eye view.