Opening panel remarks by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the annual Economic Policy Symposium “The policy implications of labour market transition” organised by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Jackson Hole Jackson Hole, 23 August 2025 Alexis de Tocqueville – one of the keenest observers of early American democracy – once wrote: “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” In monetary policy, too, we often look to past cycles for...

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The European Commission has today launched a Call for Evidence and a public consultation to seek input on the scope and content of its revision of the Guidelines on State aid for rescuing and restructuring non-financial undertakings in difficulty (‘Rescue and Restructuring Guidelines'). This input will be used to update the Guidelines to ensure that they remain fit to meet their objectives. The Rescue and Restructuring Guidelines set out the conditions under which aid to non-financial undertakings in difficulty may be considered in line...

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At “Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy,” an economic symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming Over the course of this year, the U.S. economy has shown resilience in a context of sweeping changes in economic policy. In terms of the Fed's dual-mandate goals, the labor market remains near maximum employment, and inflation, though still somewhat elevated, has come down a great deal from its post-pandemic highs. At the same time,...

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Panel remarks by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum The global economy is at a challenging juncture. But despite recent trade tensions and substantial uncertainty, global growth has remained broadly steady so far. This resilience has been mainly driven by tariff-induced distortions of economic activity. In the first quarter of the year, for example, we saw strong global frontloading as importers boosted their inventories in anticipation of higher tariffs. That has led...

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By Pablo Anaya Longaric, Katharina Cera, Georgios Georgiadis and Christoph Kaufmann Investors who sell off sovereign bonds in times of stress are commonly referred to as “vigilantes” as they punish governments for what they consider to be bad policy choices. This post finds that investment funds account for most net sales of sovereign bonds in such times. Financial markets are sensitive to macroeconomic and political news, especially given the high debt levels in several euro area countries. On sovereign bond markets,...

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But in most situations, productivity is the better path to prosperity Competitiveness, Michael Porter remarked in The Competitive Advantage of Nations, his 1990 best-selling book, means different things to different people. As a member of US President Ronald Reagan’s competitiveness commission in the 1980s, the American economist met business leaders who believed it was about a global strategy to compete in world markets and members of Congress who thought it meant having a positive balance of trade. Today this commonly used...

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