*  *  *  Senator Angara, Representative Jaime Lopez, fellow bankers, co-workers in government, members of the media, special guests, good evening. On behalf of the Members of the Monetary Board, I welcome and thank all of you for joining us in celebrating this important milestone: the 15th anniversary of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
As central banks go, you may say that at age 15, we belong to Generation Y. But youthful as we are as an organization, we are really standing on the shoulders of our richly experienced forerunner that is the Central Bank of the Philippines. This enables us to leverage the freshness of our eyes with a vantage point progressively built from accumulated experience.