Uncertainty and its Role for Monetary Policy as a Driver of Europe's Competitiveness

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

It's a huge pleasure to open this year's summer discourse, Sommerdiskurs aus Wirtschaft, Recht und Kultur, an institution which we started in 2008 as an encountering place for students, alumni, executives, experts from government and academia in order to discuss the complexity of today's world and to allow for a discussion about solutions for the challenges we face right now.

Now this year's theme is managing risks and uncertainty, or in German, .

And I must say that it was more a hope than an analysis, which led us to this theme.

Anyway.

We are extremely happy to have two outstanding speakers tonight who will introduce this year's summer discourse.

The first keynote speaker will be Governor Martin Kocher.

Professor Kocher is one of Austria's most well-known economists, and he already was a top economist before he then was nominated director of the Institute for Advanced Studies and later then in 2021 became a member of the Austrian Federal Government, first as Minister for Labour and then later as Minister both for Labour and the Economy.

And last year he then became Governor of the Austrian Central Bank.

We have, our two speakers have a very tight schedule tonight, and therefore, I limit my introduction to these very scarce words of praise for Martin, who is also the president of the association of the friends of the Sommerhochschule and I'm very proud that he already was a speaker here before he became a minister and before he became a governor.

But of course today it's a huge honor for us to have him here as our keynote speaker.

He's talking about uncertainty and its role for monetary policy.