* 1  *  *  Introduction  Ladies and gentlemen, Thank you very much for your invitation – I am delighted to be able to speak to you today. For more than four years now, we have been plagued by a crisis that has changed its appearance on a number of occasions.
It spread from the US property market to the global financial system, from there to the real economy, leading finally to a sovereign debt crisis in several euro area countries. A sovereign debt crisis – let me emphasise this explicitly – that is a severe test for monetary union, but is not a crisis of the euro.