When I joined the Central Bank in 1996, it had just under 600 full-time staff, 13 divisions and a senior management team of just eight people. There were no women on the senior management team and not even one woman at head of division level. Today, the Bank has a much broader mandate and almost 2,000 staff.
It was, in particular, Hans Tietmeyer, my pre-predecesssor and Vice-President at the time who was quick to grasp the far-reaching importance of those historic events for central banking: the fall of the Iron Curtain, the collapse of the communist regimes in central and eastern Europe, the subsequent transformation in those countries from a planned economy to a market economy as well as the break-up of the Soviet Union and the resulting formation of new, independent states.