GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the G20 area grew by 0.7% in the second quarter of 2026, slightly down from 0.8% in the previous quarter, according to provisional estimates (Figure 1). This reflected a mixed picture across G20 countries for which data were available, with most recording a slowdown. Among G20 economies with available data, the contraction in Saudi Arabia deepened, with GDP falling by 4.8% in Q2 2026, following a 1.4% decline in Q1. This mainly reflected a sharp...

Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at “Hofburg im Dialog – Economy, Europe, Resilience” in Vienna, Austria Vienna, 14 September 2026 Let me begin with a story that starts in this city. In this country, the years before 1873 have a name: the “Gründerzeit”, or “founders’ era”. The old city walls had come down and the Ringstrasse was rising where they had stood. Railways were pushing out across the empire. New banks and joint stock companies were being founded by the...

Remarks by Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director at the Bank for International Settlement Dear Fabio, dear Pablo, dear governors—thank you for inviting me here to share a few thoughts on the challenges faced by central banks as our stewards of monetary policy. Over the past 20 years, we have seen the Great Moderation give way to the global financial crisis, followed by a long spell at the effective lower bound, followed by a succession of large shocks, from the pandemic to the...

Europe has plenty of world-class research, talent and creativity. However, too often ideas originating in Europe are turned into economic success by others, elsewhere. This is because European innovators face barriers here and find it difficult to bring their ideas to life. As a result, the Commission proposed a new European innovation act to help Europe's most innovative ideas be developed, financed and scaled up in Europe. To strengthen the EU innovation system, the proposal will address two main challenges....

Surpluses and deficits reflect deeper choices about saving and investment across interconnected economies. More than 80 years ago, John Maynard Keynes centered his work on the persistence of global imbalances. The great economist tried to resolve what he described as the “secular international problem” at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 through an international clearinghouse. But the conference’s final agreement included only a weaker set of remedies. Concern about imbalances has waxed and waned in the decades since, but has returned to the forefront...

Blog | US tech giants are increasingly tapping the euro area bond market to fund their investments. The ECB Blog investigates the consequences for this market and the potential for these developments to reshape it. The infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) requires huge investments. Think of the gigantic data centres and the massive electricity consumption to power them. US tech giants, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, operate massive cloud and AI infrastructure. That is why these companies, known as hyperscalers,...