Klaus Liebscher: The importance of the Bretton Woods institutions for small countries Opening address by Dr Klaus Liebscher, Governor of the Austrian National Bank, at the Conference on “60 Years of Bretton Woods - governance of the international financial system - looking ahead”, Vienna, 21 June 2004.
In 1978 I was an adviser to President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who, together with the then German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, made the decision to launch the European Monetary System. Since then I’ve worked in different ways and in different functions to realise the single currency, which is a milestone in the deepening of the European Union.