Speech  Embargo 19 September 2019, 5.30 pm  Fourth Karl Brunner Distinguished Lecture Introduction of Raghuram Rajan, ETH Zurich  Thomas J. Jordan Chairman of the Governing Board Swiss National Bank Zurich, 19 September 2019 © Swiss National Bank, Zurich, 2019  Page 1/4  Ladies and gentlemen I am very pleased to welcome you all to this year’s Karl Brunner Distinguished Lecture. This occasion marks the 30th anniversary of Karl Brunner’s death. In the Karl Brunner Lecture Series, the Swiss National Bank pays tribute to academics whose research is of particular relevance for central banking. Today we are celebrating the outstanding contribution made by Raghuram Rajan, the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. We are honoured that Dr Rajan has accepted our invitation to deliver this lecture. Raghuram Rajan was born on 3 February 1963 in Bhopal, India. He started his career with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Following the decision to leave the sphere of electromagnetic fields and waves in favour of the oscillations of the economy and financial markets, Raghu joined the doctoral programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received a PhD for his thesis ʻEssays on Banking’. Four years later, at the age of just 32, he became a full professor of finance at the University of Chicago. Exceptional academic Raghu is an exceptional academic.
So there is a ground. We may asses that the shareholder in Slovenia is currently in unfavorable condition and is unable to financially support the bank in Macedonia. Not only financially, but also from a functional point of view. We have not yet made that assessment, but we could. It is an argument that we could use at any time if the shareholders from Slovenia do not perceive the situation here realistically and do not take the right decisions for their bank in Macedonia. The Euro area is out of recession. You were the most optimistic, even more than the government, and projected growth of 2.2 percent for this year. Do you remain at this projection or will it go up? The latest projection is still 2.2 percent, although we make a reassessment every month. Currently, developments are somewhat more favorable than those we have taken into account in our projection of 2.2 percent. It is true that at the very beginning we came out with the highest estimate for the economic growth this year. The data available so far suggest that we would be the closest to the actual development, which could be even better. In the beginning, in the first and second quarters, growth in the Macedonian economy was driven by some factors that were not very much related to the situation in the euro area, but our expectations for the second half of the year were that the European economy will recover, and that it will contribute positively to growth.