However, during the past 20 years, the euro area has essentially forged ahead through crises, with the creation of the European Stability Mechanism to help Member States in 2012 – supporting among others Portugal – or the Banking Union in 2014 in response to the Spanish or Irish crises. As distance grows with the last financial crisis, general European interest has nowadays waned. This is a very serious problem: in 2017 and 2018, in what might be seen as the sunny summer of the economic cycle, we, Europeans, proved unable to fix the roof. And this takes me to our challenges for 2019. II. Our challenges in the face of 2019’s uncertainties 1. A slowdown and not a recession. A word first on our economic environment. At the global level, activity is clearly decelerating, but we are not heading towards a recession. According to the IMF, global growth could stand at 3.5% in 2019 after 3.7% in 2018. The main explanation for this slowdown is the increase in general uncertainty due to geopolitical risks, starting worldwide with trade tensions initiated by the US administration and in Europe with the prospect of a hard Brexit, very damaging but unfortunately less and less implausible. Uncertainty is depressing business confidence and possibly investment by fostering a wait-and-see attitude [slide 5].5 For instance, in France, manufacturers’ expectations on the overall economic outlook have turned down earlier and more significantly than their expectations on their own production.
13  Ferrucci, Jiménez-Rodríguez and Onorante (2012, , "Food price pass-through in the Euro Area: Non-linearities and the role of the common agricultural policy" International Journal of Central Banking ) find asymmetries between positive and negative shocks in the food inputs, Borrallo, Cuadro and Pérez (2023, forthcoming) confirm these results for the euro area by extending the sample to the present time. In the case of oil, Kilian and Vigfusson (2011, Quantitative Economics, "Are the responses of the U.S. economy asymmetric in energy price increases and decreases?") show that there are no significant asymmetries in the United States. However, Garzón and Hierro (2021, Economic Modelling " Asymmetries in the transmission of oil price shocks to inflation in the Eurozone") find that asymmetries do exist in the euro area. 14  According to the ECB's March forecast, nominal wage growth, as measured by compensation per employee, will increase from 4.6% in 2022 to 5,3% in 2023, before declining to 4,4% in 2024 and 3,6% in 2025. 15  This has happened in a context of a sharp increase in public employment, whose growth has accounted for about half of total employment growth since the end of 2019. 16  The ECB experimental tracker of negotiated wages shows a clear upward shift in wage increases agreed for 2022 and 2023. Contract negotiations during 2022 delivered wage increases around 4,4% and 4,8% for 2022 and 2023 respectively, with higher increases the more recent the agreement is.