The President of the European Central Bank (ECB) called for a new European economic policy mix with a strong focus on investment in a first expected speech in Frankfurt on Friday 22 November.
“Investment is a particularly important part of the response to today’s challenges, because it is both today’s demand and tomorrow’s supply”, she said.
Noting that public investment in the euro area was still at a lower level than in the pre-financial crisis period of 2008, she saw investment opportunities to increase productivity, adapt to the digital age and make production tools more sustainable.
Tools such as the InvestEU programme, which will replace the Juncker investment plan after 2020 (see EUROPE 12239/13), and the future fiscal capacity for the euro area (see EUROPE 12346/2) will contribute to this, she said.
For Mrs Lagarde, it will also be necessary to create the conditions for companies to invest with confidence in the single market. “Completing the digital single market, the capital markets union and the single market in services can provide the impetus Europe needs to launch new and innovative firms”, she noted.
The ECB President also referred to the deepening of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which would guarantee the “right trade-off” between “enough protection against moral hazard to discourage under-saving, but enough mutual insurance to prevent over-saving”.
Finally, the very accommodating monetary policy inherited from the Draghi era is in place and will be the subject of an in-depth analysis under this new mandate (see EUROPE 12358/6).
On Friday, the daily El País reported that between 2003 and 2005, Mrs Lagarde was a Director of a company owned by the law firm Baker & McKenzie, registered in Bermuda, a country that last May left the European blacklist of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions (see EUROPE 12255/27). (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)