This is why the National Bank of Poland appreciates the establishment of Forum SEPA Polska by the Polish banking community and is deeply convinced that all programmes and decisions worked out and made in the course of such cooperation will increase the satisfaction of Poles who use services of national banks through making product offers more attractive, through increasing security and level of services and through reducing their prices. Inhabitants of the euro area obtained many benefits upon the introduction of the euro in the cashless turnover in 1999 and in cash handling in 2001. Transaction costs of foreign currency exchange disappeared, home bias on financial markets was reduced, risk premium decreased and the euro has become an important currency in which securities are issued on international financial markets. Menzie Chinn and Jakob Frankel, well-known American economists project that if Great Britain joins the euro area, the euro will replace the dollar as the international reserve currency 2 as early as in the late second decade of the 21st century, which might entail additional benefits for European consumers  1  See also S Quinn and W Roberds “An Economic Explanation of the Early Bank of Amsterdam, Debasement, Bills of Exchange, and the Emergence of the First Central Bank”, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Working Paper 2006-13, September 2006. 2  M Chinn, J Frankel, “Will the Euro Eventually Surpass the Dollar As Leading International Reserve Currency?”, presented at NBER Conference, Newport, RI, 1-2 June 2005.
Secondly, monetary union still has a long way to go to achieve sounder governance that will reduce the union’s vulnerability to shocks, provide for better coordination of its economic policies and promote the reforms needed to encourage and to be able to sustain long-term growth. 3/7  The role of monetary policy I shall first address the role that monetary policy has played and is continuing to play in the recovery. The confluence of the financial and sovereign crises in a European monetary union whose institutional architecture was incomplete meant that the ECB had to assume a pivotal role in the economic policy response. Initial measures took the form of a gradual reduction in interest rates and the granting of practically unlimited amounts of liquidity to banking systems, at increasingly longer maturities, with greater flexibility in the attendant collateral policies. In 2012, amid a second recession in the euro area and financial turmoil, the possibility of purchasing the public debt of countries subject to financial pressures was introduced. While this possibility was not actually activated, it contributed to staving off the threat of the single currency breaking up. Yet by mid-2014, and despite the fact that the most acute episodes of the crisis had been overcome, the euro area was immersed in a scenario of low growth and deflation risks in which various external and internal factors were at play. On the external front, the weakness of global growth and the collapse of commodities prices accentuated the downside pressures of producer prices.