Independent review to be launched on payments infrastructure TARGET2 incident on 23 October 2020 caused outage lasting almost 10 hours Findings of the review to be published by the second quarter of 2021 The European Central Bank (ECB) will launch an independent review of an incident that affected its real-time gross settlement system TARGET2 on 23 October 2020, causing an outage for almost 10 hours. An initial investigation determined that a software defect in a network device was the...

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The European Commission has today welcomed the agreement between the European Parliament and EU Member States in the Council on Europe's next long-term budget and NextGenerationEU, the temporary recovery instrument. Once adopted, the package of a total of €1.8 trillion will be the largest package ever financed through the EU budget. It will help rebuild a post-COVID-19 Europe, which will be greener, more digital, more resilient and better fit for the current and forthcoming challenges. President Ursula von der Leyen said: “I welcome today's...

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Keynote speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the ECB Forum on Central Banking | Frankfurt am Main, 11 November 2020 | Let me begin by welcoming all of you to this year’s ECB Forum on Central Banking. Regrettably, we cannot be together in Sintra this time, but I trust that this virtual environment will be no less conducive to challenging ideas and productive debate. The purpose of this year’s conference is to examine the challenges facing central banking...

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Remarks by Vitor Gaspar at ECB Forum on Central Banking 2020 | November 12 | 1.  Introduction It is such a pleasure to participate in the ECB Forum on Central Banking and discuss the paper by Evi Papa on Fiscal Rules and Macroeconomic Stabilization in the Euro Area. The paper reviews relevant theoretical and empirical literature and, at the end, examines the Next Generation EU program. The paper is well-written, and it covers a vast landscape. If offers much to learn and...

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The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU securities markets regulator, today publishes its first annual report on the use by National Competent Authorities (NCAs) of sanctions under the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD). The report published today contains an overview of the applicable legal framework and information on the penalties and measures imposed by NCAs from 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2018 and from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019. The number of NCAs issuing sanctions increased...

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The free movement of capital is a key long-standing objective of the European Union. It is one of the pillars of the Single Market, along with the free movement of people, goods and services. Despite the Commission’s efforts to achieve the ambitious goal of building a capital markets union (CMU), results are still to come, according to a report presented by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) today. In the EU, businesses traditionally largely rely on banks for financing their...

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Today, the European Commission is taking the first steps towards building the European Health Union announced by President von der Leyen in her State of the Union address. The Commission is putting forward a set of proposals to strengthen the EU's health security framework, and to reinforce the crisis preparedness and response role of key EU agencies. In order to step up the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and future health emergencies, more coordination at EU level is needed. Drawing lessons from the...

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Lockdowns, working from home, and physical distancing caused people to spend larger shares of their household budgets on food and housing, while fewer people bought nonessentials, like airline tickets and clothing. And with incomes down as millions have lost their jobs, spending on nonessential items will likely remain depressed. The consumer price index (CPI) does not reflect these abrupt changes in spending patterns because the CPI weights are not continuously updated. For example, the CPI could be pulled down by a...

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The European Commission has informed Amazon of its preliminary view that it has breached EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in online retail markets. The Commission takes issue with Amazon systematically relying on non-public business data of independent sellers who sell on its marketplace, to the benefit of Amazon's own retail business, which directly competes with those third party sellers. The Commission also opened a second formal antitrust investigation into the possible preferential treatment of Amazon's own retail offers and...

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