*  *  Introduction  Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and a very warm welcome to this, the Deutsche Bundesbank’s third cash symposium. We launched our cash symposium as a platform for fostering dialogue and promoting interaction between the various stakeholders in the cash space.
The combination of ongoing deleveraging by banks and households, increased fiscal austerity and declining confidence is expected to restrain growth across the advanced economies.   The Bank now expects that the euro area – where these dynamics are most acute – will experience a brief recession.