Now is the time to act in France, where stepping up reforms is a priority, with a focus on two main areas: on the one hand, sustainably consolidating our public finances, and on the other, aiming to achieve an overall transformation, with and a major simplification effort in both labour market and the goods and services market, and large-scale investment in education, vocational training and apprenticeships. Even though we must pursue this course, this is what the new government appears to be doing with the labour market reform underway since this summer, and efforts to bring the government deficit down to 2.6% in the 2018 budget, well below the threshold of 3% of GDP for the first time in 11 years. Now is the time to act in Europe, above all. We cannot both overburden monetary policy – our German friends are right in this respect – and refuse Economic Union which is the prerequisite for a sounder Monetary Union. So we must not let ourselves be slowed down by sterile debates or false suspicions: there is no question of implementing a “transfer union”, which would only benefit certain countries; we must not get bogged down by  Page 7 sur 8 considerations about methods either, between intergovernmental and community methods.
You are well aware that we at the ECB’s Governing Council will decide this autumn on the re-calibration of our policy instruments beyond the end of the year – and, to quote Mario Draghi, “probably the bulk of these decisions will be taken in October”. We are now faced with a simple requirement, in line with our mandate to maintain price stability, and the progress towards our inflation  Page 4 sur 8 target: we have to reduce the intensity of our net asset purchases, while maintaining overall a substantially accommodative monetary policy. As regards our asset purchases, we have to reduce their intensity in a pragmatic manner, as we already decided successfully in December 2016. “Pragmatic” because, while keeping the current rules – we shouldn’t change any of the parameters, including the issuer and issue limits –, we can on the one hand exploit the margins of flexibility of the programme and we must on the other hand hold in reserve an additional purchasing capacity – if needed. So, there is no reason to be worried by the prospect of an adequate reduction of our net purchases, which would be perfectly compatible with maintaining a substantial degree of monetary accommodation. Indeed, QE is not limited to net asset purchases, and monetary policy is not limited to QE. Our monetary policy is based on a set of instruments [slide]: it is not a solo, but a quartet.