*  *  *  Dear Governor, Minister, Ambassador Dear colleagues Ladies and Gentlemen It is a pleasure for me to be in Cairo today to sign the Memorandum of Understanding with Governor El Okdah. This signing confirms the close cooperation between the central banking community of the European Union and the Central Bank of Egypt.
Second, extraordinarily benign financial conditions may have created an environment of over-leveraging and excess lending, potentially endangering the stability of the financial system. Third, the size and composition of the asset purchases may have distorted resource allocation, postponing balance sheet adjustments and crowding out other financial-market players. Fourth, the independence of monetary policy from fiscal policy may have been damaged.