In this respect, on a more personal note, allow me to comment on what I read with surprise in some British newspapers last July: I personally never met with the City’s Special Representative to the EU, Mr Browne, and the Banque de France has never wished for Brexit to be detrimental to the City of London, and we have friendly and frequent contact with the City of London Corporation. But, besides savings from the rest of the world, the savings of the EU-27 Member States will be increasingly handled within the single market, given its significant size and the safety of its  Page 5 sur 5  rules. This means that we will move towards some degree of “Europeanisation” for wholesale banks, insurers and asset managers. It is symmetrically the duty of Europe and its member countries to be business-friendly and attractive to the financial industry. We should not achieve this by lowering the bar for our common regulations: the SSM, EIOPA and ESMA are duly mobilised to prevent certain entities that keep their resources outside the EU from setting up empty shell corporations in the EU, mere company name plates, to benefit from passporting rights. We should rather be attractive by offering a stable and favourable framework for investors, including infrastructures, labour skills and labour laws, and taxes. There is some fair but positive emulation in this regard.
The need for active multilateralism to face our global challenges. Let me now turn to my second point: the need for active multilateralism to face our global challenges. In the current context, international cooperation between countries is maybe more important than ever. Beyond the EU’s borders, and with all our partners, we have to strive to maintain the collective rules of the game in order to preserve the improvement in the global economic environment. The global recovery has indeed been gathering pace since 2016: according to the latest IMF forecast, global growth should stand at 3.6% in 2017, after 3.2% in 2016. However, there are two major risks threatening growth: first, financial instability, with the continued rise in global public and private debt since the start of the 2000s – from 190% of global GDP in 2001 to 230% in 2016. The 2008 crisis stemmed from this, but this trend has unfortunately not slowed down since; the private debt in emerging countries (namely corporate debt) has risen particularly rapidly. Any temptation to dilute the financial regulations implemented in the wake of the 2008 crisis would be all the more worrying.