And thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen, as well with that transition. And I would also like to say, Ferdinando, well done and warm congratulations to you on a very, very interesting panel. So in this final panel, ladies and gentlemen, we want to step back and

look at the big picture when it comes to international cooperation in the economic realm generally. And as you know, the financial crisis spurred transformation of governance structures and processes, not only within Europe, as we discussed in the panel before lunch, but also internationally.

The G20, for example, to some degree superseded the G7 and became the platform for coordinating crisis management following the financial crisis. The FSB, Basel III, various aspects of the new regime that came into place after 2008 undeniably have made global capital markets safer and more resilient.

The question is, is this system still fit for purpose? We are witnessing a retreat from multilateralism. Where does that leave global economic governance today? What global cooperation arrangements will work in future?

Those are our guiding questions for this panel, and we are going to begin in just a moment with an input from Professor Jean Pisani Ferri. He holds the Thomaso Pardo Schiope chair. Mr. Schiope has been mentioned many times in these proceedings so far. You hold that chair at the European University Institute in Florence.

You also teach economics at Sciences Po in Paris and at the Herty School here in Berlin. And Jean is also the founder and was the director of Blugel, the think tank in Brussels.

And he has served in high level advisory positions in the French government, not least as commissioner general for policy planning. It's also my great pleasure to welcome Caroline Atkinson. She is a member of the executive board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She was President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics and has also served in senior positions at the IMF and

the US Treasury Department. Great to have you with us, Caroline. And also wonderful to have on this panel, Maurice Oppsfeld. He is class of 1958 professor of economics and former head of the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and he formerly served at the IMF as economic counselor and

director of research and also as a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. So I'll ask Jean to please get us started, and then we will plunge right into discussion. Thank you, Melinda. This conference would have been incomplete without a session on

international cooperation. Not only because of Thomaso Padovascoppa, because he was in charge and he really thought that was the first thing about the external dimension of the ECB policy, but also because of Ignacio, because Ignacio, both in terms of his career at the IMF,

at the Italian institution, the ECB, but also in terms of his writings, his research has very much devoted part of his life to international issues. So I think we had to discuss those issues. Now, we want to be very short in this discussion, so let me focus on a few points.

I will start from the premise that the demand for international collective action is especially high these days. I mean, you can just name the very many fields, climate being perhaps the most prominent, but beyond climate, many fields in which there is a very strong, very high demand for collective action. At the same time, we're facing a sort of unprecedented accumulation

of roadblocks, having to do with populism, having to do with the fact that the institutional architecture is incomplete, having to do with geopolitical considerations in the part of the US and

the part of China, and that leaves us with a conundrum. How can we organize collective action in a world that's more fragmented, in which the supply, the appetite for collective action is much more limited? So let me start from this question.

I think the first point I'd like to make is that we have to recognize a disconnect between the institution we have and the type of interdependence that has developed. So we have strong institutions whose mandate was defined at a time where the type of interdependence that existed was quite

different. I mean, we had even the Bretton Woods Institution, the fund that has evolved considerably, but still had a mandate that was defined in a very different world in terms of the financial integration, and the bank even more so, and the WTO also with respect of the global value chain. So we have limited sort of disconnect, and we have the gaps.

And at the same time, I think the fair assumption is that there is no room for imagining that there will be ambitious new agreements covering the fields in which we have gaps. This was tried, actually.

This was tried with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the 90s. This was tried with attempts to form an institution for competition. This was tried with the Kyoto Protocol, so it has failed. So we have to start from there.

So what can we build on? I think the first thing we have to build on, we can build on, is the fact that existing institutions, even though their mandate may be limited, are there, have accumulated expertise. And that somehow has a social capital of the global economy.

So that's where we have accumulated not only expertise, but also a way of interacting, a way of governing those institutions. And that's something international cooperation must build on. So make the best possible use of institutions, even though their formal mandate is limited.

They can evolve beyond their formal mandate. Probably the best example is the OECD. The OECD was built as a secretariat of the European Payments Union. It has become the assessor of education in the world over. So it shows that institutions can evolve considerably. So that's the second I should mention,

because that echoes everything we have discussed today. The fact that independent agencies with nationally focused mandates, but relatively similar mandates, have a record of cooperating, of interacting, that's fairly impressive. And obviously, I'm speaking here of the central bank.

I'm speaking here of the regulator. But let me take an example outside the scope of what we discussed today. Let me take the example of competition authorities. It is remarkable that even today we have competition authorities being able to exercise extraterritorial power in a still and non-conflictual manner.

So we have the European Union blocking mergers in the US. But that's not only the EU. I mean, we know about the EU, but that's also the case of various competition authorities the world over. I'm not sure that's not fragile.

It's probably very fragile. But it's still there, and it shows the potential of this model of cooperation. Then we have a series of relatively soft mechanisms. And we tend, as economists, to sort of point out immediately that soft mechanisms do not solve collective action problems,

because we have in mind always the prisoner's dilemma and the fact that there is free riding and an incentive to free riding has to be corrected by strong mechanisms. It is not true of all problems. I think we've got to recognize that not all problems of international coordination have as underlying problems

that we've got to solve a prisoner's dilemma problem. Many problems can be solved just by building trust, by ensuring transparency, by monitoring of what is actually done. And actually, banking regulation is a very interesting example in this regard,

because in banking regulation, you have standards. Those standards are not monetary. You have the monitoring of the implementation of standards. You have transparency. And somehow, this has led to a convergence towards those standards. So it can work without compulsion.

Then what do we have? We have clubs. And here, I would like to refer to the paper you wrote back in the early 2000s with Alberto Alesina and Federico Eto'o on clubs and international unions,

looking at how formally we can understand the formation of clubs and what they can deliver. Clubs, or coalition of the willing, in practice are important. We had an early example of a successful club with the Montreal Protocol on CFDs, which effectively

eliminated CFDs. But we have many other clubs. We have trade clubs. We have clubs in a series of fields. And the question is, how far can we build on that? I mean, the advantage is that it's voluntary cooperation. It's coalition of the willing. The downside, and you pointed that out in this paper,

is that clubs can be biased. They can be biased towards the preferences of the early members of the club. And they can be, therefore, too limited, because indelgiously, they tend to remain too small. So the small club syndrome is a difficulty.

So the question is how to solve that. And probably one way of solving that is to ensure that clubs are rooted in general principles, so that the general principles are preserved. And clubs are sufficiently rooted in general principle to avoid them turning into very small coalitions. And then finally, I would wish to mention the role of political leadership.

And that here, I would refer to the paper we actually wrote together in the G20, when after three years, we started assessing the effectiveness of the G20. And the G20 has been a combination of good surprise and disappointment, disappointment because it did not deliver on the early promises of ambitious micro

coordination. But in fact, it has delivered a certain degree of political leadership, and has actually even served as a sort of orchestrator and arm twister in some circumstances. Look at what had been achieved in the field of taxation, a very difficult field where Europe has been unable to achieve anything.

In fact, at the level of the G20, there's pressure by the G20, and the support of the OECD has delivered the end of the bank's secrecy and the automatic exchange of information, which is, I think, a meaningful result. And so that shows that this sort of combination can deliver.

I think I should stop here. And perhaps if I have more to say, I can say it later in the discussion. Let me just conclude referring again to something that we wrote together, but actually you wrote it, about the G20. The paper was named Character in Search of an Author,

and that was a reference to Pirandello. And the difference to Pirandello came obviously from you. And you wrote that, as in Pirandello's play, but hopefully with less drama and despair, the right characters are there, but the script is not written. And I think judging where we are today,

we're even further apart, further away from the script being written than we were back then. Thank you very, very much, Jean. And you will indeed get an opportunity to elaborate, in fact, in just a few minutes. But let me first go to Caroline and ask you,

you played a strong role in shaping the US response to the international financial crisis. You were, for example, President Obama's personal representative at the G8 and G20 summits. We've heard again and again today,

and I think we all know there will be another crisis. We just don't know when. My question to you at the outset would be, would cooperation function now or in the near future as constructively as it did then? Well, of course, I will name the elephant in the room,

which is the current president, President Trump. I think that it's not obvious that you would get the US leadership that occurred around the previous crisis. And that US leadership, as many of you know, was not only in the US-triggered crisis of 2008-9,

but also in the Euro crisis in 2011 through 13, the United States and President Obama personally played an important role in corralling and helping to support European leaders towards resolution, or at least taking steps to resolve the Euro crisis.

And obviously, we don't know now quite how that would turn out if there were a crisis. I don't think there will be a, there should be some wood for me to touch, but I don't expect a crisis in the next couple of years. I do think that there can be political change in the United States. I think there are many,

there's a backbone there of people that would be ready to think about leadership because just to, I agree with so much of what Jean put so well about clubs and norms as opposed to rules and their possibilities, but I do think you need leadership.

And that is one thing that is lacking globally now. I think we see that, obviously, in both of my countries, the UK and the US, and in some others that, partly because of or perhaps contributing to the populist issues that we've talked about, the political leadership that I think you need, or one needs, we need as technocrats as well,

is not evident. And that is, I think, a real danger of the current moment. May I ask you to just say a word about, may I ask you to just say a word more about this shift of decision-making into fora like the G20.

Professor Padu Eskiopa, as I learned, doing the research for this panel, said that one reason for that shift is that many actors prefer fora that tend to work in a non-binding format. So moving out of the institutions that are binding and rules-based

into these kind of institutions. Would you say that all in all, the development or the shift shows us that the international system of governments is adaptable and will change as needed? Or would you say, in fact, it is growing

vaguer, fuzzier, and less capable of handling the big challenges? I think that it's adaptable and flexible. I want to sort of stay with that optimism. I worked for a long time in the IMF, which to many people looks like a very sort of hidebound, rules-based institution, but in fact, always relied on

a tremendous amount of flexibility. And it became less effective the more that, unfortunately, it was usually led by the United States, but the more that rules were put on its ability to act in crisis. Part of the shift is because, certainly in the United States, it's very hard to get treaties and so on approved.

When I was involved in climate discussions, I kept saying to Europeans, we want the same as you, but don't insist on a treaty because then we will have to oppose it in the United States. It won't happen, but we can manage without that, which I think was the case with the Paris Accord. But part of it comes because the world is just more complex and there are more players.

And the G20, which began as the G22 amongst central banks and finance ministers, came out of the Asian crisis when I was in the US Treasury at that time, and we realized that we didn't know who to get in touch with. We didn't have easy relationships with the Indonesians, the Koreans, the Thais, in the same way that we in the United States did with Europe,

and neither did the IMF. The IMF, although it covered in the World Bank, although every important country was a member, the constituency formula meant that many national governments didn't really feel that connection that they did in the G22.

None of these things is perfect because you want to have a small group so that you can get agreement. If you have a small group, you're leaving out a lot of people, a lot of countries. So you have to have a kind of complex, a multi-layered system, but with goodwill and leadership, that can solve problems.

I just want to tick off a few issues other than the one that, really ticking off cyber, Ebola management, trade, climate, all of those issues came up in the G20. None of them is part of the G20 mandate. Okay, great, thank you very much. Moisestfeld, in your final message

as chief economist at the IMF, you apparently departed from what would have normally been a final message as you released your last report, and instead gave a rather passionate statement about the need for more inclusive policies,

saying that if we do not move to greater inclusion and really address the problem that inequality multilateralism will not survive. Strong words. The IMF, the World Bank are now focusing to a much greater extent on the issue of inequality,

but the question for me would be whether they have the leverage to drive really broad and effective change in this area. Well, I think the question of where the World Bank will come out on multilateralism generally

is very much in question under its upcoming new management, and we'll see how that works out. I wasn't even gonna go there yet, but. You know, I think in that sort of valedictory piece, I was bemoaning the difficulties

that policymakers and technocrats like us have in communicating to what Tim Geithner would call normal people, what are the benefits of multilateralism, and I think we've actually done a pretty terrible job of it,

partly by the examples we pick, but also in some of the issues that we don't tackle, and so I think one way to get people behind it is to really convince them

that these benefits from coordination are not simply very abstract financial stability benefits that benefit people in finance and bankers, but that can actually increase prosperity at their level, and for that, we really need a policy framework that is inclusive, where people feel they gain

from policies generally, but also multilateral measures, and so this is, I think it's a major communications challenge. You know, we have had like huge successes that are easy to understand in terms of coordination, you know, on health, eradicating smallpox,

easy to understand. Now, Caroline mentioned the challenge of leadership. I think one also has to bring up the challenge of educating people about facts. You know, when I look at the US and see the anti-vaccination movement

and this idea that, you know, somehow vaccination, which is a public good, is bad for you based on zero facts, I worry about even examples like the one I gave. Corruption, we touched on in the last session. This is a global problem.

Money laundering is a global problem. It's been impossible to tackle effectively, even at the European level, but it's something that I think normal people could understand and get behind, yet, you know, we don't talk about it because we don't do it, but this is an area where I think we could sell multilateralism,

and also, you know, help address some of the perceptions about inequality. Inequality, I think, is very much at the root of a lot of the trust issues that we've been talking about today. Certainly it was mentioned in the first discussion around Mr. Tabellini's results and in the last discussion as well.

So let me ask you this. Of the processes and structures that Jean set up that he talked about, what do you think are the most effective means of addressing global inequality? Because clearly it is a global challenge. Well, you know, I think we should interpret

inequality very broadly, not just as income or wealth inequality, but, you know, inequality of opportunity, inequality of cultural access, inequality of media access. There are all sorts of,

and these are actually quite correlated, but also lead to the issue of identity and culture and resentment that we've seen play a big role in the sort of populist uprising. You know, I think there are specific

international coordination issues that are very important here. I think generally in terms of supporting economies, worldwide, you know, fund the bank, the Bretton Woods Institution is very important. But I think the one thing that I would view is very central and that hasn't really been effectively addressed

is international tax competition. Just this idea which, you know, I think Danny Roderick started pushing it over 20 years ago, but I think it's important that with capital being footloose, it's much harder to tax. And there's an incentive to raise to the bottom

that leaves the burden of providing social services and social safety nets on labor taxation. And I think this has been pretty corrosive. Now again, how do you solve the problem? You really need international recognition, international negotiation.

We've made some progress in areas like BEPS, the OECD initiative to make things somewhat better. But this is something that also could command a lot of public support. Thank you very much. So Jean, I actually wanted to ask you if you would apply some of what you said, including using coalitions of the willing clubs

to move forward to exactly that issue of money laundering, which of course is so intimately linked to inequality. I think on inequality, I mean, I would say, I agree with you. This tax dimension is major, and it's not only major actually because of inequality. It's also major because the fact

that there is tax avoidance on a massive scale undermines the consent to being taxed. Because why would you accept to be taxed yourself if you see that some big corporation doesn't pay significant tax bill? And I think that's even a bigger threat

because that is sort of the basic social contract that is undermined by that. So I think that's major. So how to tackle that? Well, as I said, for personal taxation,

where we had this bank secrecy issue, it requires some arm twisting. I mean, it's not going to emerge from consensus. There are interests, and there are jurisdictions that have a very strong interest, not to speak obviously of the companies themselves, have a very strong interest in keeping things how they are. So the good news is that paradoxically,

the Trump administration may facilitate things because it has lowered the tax rates. So it needs to broaden the tax base. And because it has this rough justice type of approach to global taxation on a national basis, which sort of sets in motion things

and forces others to act. If I can add a word on something and that was not yet mentioned, this is the issue of legitimacy of institutions. I think that's major in the present times because what we're seeing is a challenge to the view that those institutions belong to the global community.

China doesn't feel that those institutions really belong to it. And many emerging countries feel Europe is overrepresented, that the rules that are embedded in the code, et cetera, represent more a certain vision and a certain interest. So I think the risk, if we don't act on that,

is that we're going to undermine these three institutions. So what I said are what remains as a sort of basic structure we have to rely on. This requires changing the governance, continuing the rebalancing, and this requires accepting to challenge some of the views which may too much reflect the interest

and the prejudices of advanced countries. Actually, that's what the fund did with this issue of capital flows, where the fund moved from being the advocate of capital financial account liberalization to a much more balanced view. And I think that was very welcome. Let us go directly on to exactly that issue

and talk a little bit about both the rise of China and the retreat of the U.S. from multilateralism. Caroline, Chinese-U.S. tensions, of course, are not only a product or an attribute of the current U.S. administration.

During your tenure as Deputy National Security Advisor, the U.S. staunchly opposed the newly formed Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. And of course, that creation of that bank was to some degree associated with the fact that reform and adaptation in the IMF

had been blocked for so long. So does the AIIB track record that we have now seen, it hasn't been fully operational long, but the track record so far looks fairly moderate. It's doing co-financing with the World Bank, with the Asian Development Bank. It's also gotten stellar credit ratings so far.

Does that assuage concerns that people in Washington had at that time about what the AIIB would represent? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that the AIIB's track record has been sort of vastly better than it might have been

because of the inclusion of many European members and so on. And also because of the conditions that were agreed between President Obama and President Xi when there was a meeting, a bilateral meeting in the fall of 2015 when the two presidents agreed

that the AIIB would follow the procurement rules and follow the rules and be part of the international system. That was sort of forced by the United States rather than being forced on China. The agreement came at that level,

not at the level of the Europeans. But at the same time, as we've seen a lot in the press recently, China has sort of said, well, okay, the AIIB is going to be this kind of pretty good place. And we're really pushing the Belt and Road Initiative. And the Belt and Road Initiative has, obviously there's been controversy here

about whether Italy will join and how the eastern central parts of Europe will work with China as opposed to other parts of Europe. And I think there is a real question for all of us in the United States and in Europe about how to manage in a positive way the rise of China.

One, I'll just make two quick points about that. A lot of, in the United States now, there's a lot of sort of revisionism, not actually in the direction that you've pointed to, but more in the opposite direction. Criticism of the Obama and Bush and Clinton administrations for being too friendly to China,

too willing to allow China to grow its exports and become a member and a free rider on the system. And that's definitely the current push in the United States. One thing that worries me about that is that the intelligence community

and the departments of defense and all the rest of it, I saw this up close, never believed in supporting a strong China. I mean, basically they always were nervous, I think probably in every country, certainly in the United States, about China's rise. And that was tempered by a feeling, by belief on the part of the economists

and the politicians of foreign policy that actually one should embrace China and we could have shared interests in a strong and prosperous global economy. That sort of tempering has gone away with the current administration as we see.

And I think that makes it a much, it puts us at a riskier moment. The other thing is that we do need to bear in mind that you always have, and as everybody here knows, you have to work with what makes sense. A diplomacy is about figuring out where the other person's interests overlap with yours

and then finding that sweet spot. And it doesn't work by just pressure. You have to persuade people that it's in their interests to take measures against climate or whatever it may be. And I think these informal settings can promote that

because it's embarrassing for one leader, although unfortunately Trump did this, but it's typically embarrassing for one leader to refuse to join a consensus that is shared by many others. You know, it's difficult for Modi to hold out on a small trade agreement

if everybody else around the table is agreeing with it on trade facilitation, for example, or Brazil and Turkey on climate. I think that, but it takes a lot of work. And I think, with one last point, Jean mentioned about Europe's overrepresentation. I think that is a real problem.

I don't really know how to address it because the United States' share of the global economy actually hasn't changed that much in the last 20 or 30 years. One would think, you know, people talk about China coming up, the United States going down. No, the United States has stayed there, China's gone up, and Europe and the rest of the world

have got their share of the global economy. And I don't know how Europe deals with that. Maurice Oppsfeld, Caroline has just talked about this increasing view of China in the U.S. as a rival and an adversarial kind of view.

And certainly that is the message that people in Europe believe they're being given on Huawei, for example, but in other areas as well. Essentially, a lot of pressure, you're with us, you're with them. And Europe, nonetheless, continues to say, although its latest strategy does also define China

as a strategic rival, nonetheless, there's a lot of talk here about Europe trying to find a middle way. Do you think there is a middle way out there and a role for Europe? Or is this a clash of titans and Europe is kind of beside the point?

Well, I think there is a middle way. Part of the difficulty of finding that is that Europe has its own vulnerability to U.S. policies, a lot of vulnerabilities to somewhat capricious U.S. policies,

whether it's about trade and autos or whether it's defense. And so there may be pressure on them and they may feel pressure to be on the U.S. side. Now, you can think of ways in which that could actually be productive. You know, if the U.S. and Europe would

confront China in terms of reforming the WTO structure and enhancing mechanisms to monitor compliance in a cooperative way, I think they could achieve some results.

But I fear that the use of coercion is gonna just lead to a lot of instability without actually serving the U.S.'s purposes. And looking at China, they have their own issues. I mean, China is becoming a more closed economy.

It's becoming more politically closed. It's becoming more authoritarian. There's an increasing concentration of economic resources in a very inefficient state sector and of economic power in the center. And so, you know, at some level,

maybe that allows deals to be made. But I think it's actually not a really good development for certainly not the future of that country, but also for the ability of China to, you know, actually make some of the concessions that the U.S. is asking of it and that Europe would also like to see.

Would you say nonetheless, sorry, I think it doesn't work when I turn in this, I'll just turn more. Would you say that nonetheless, there needs to be an ongoing rebalancing of international institutions to try to bring China more into the fold,

whatever that might mean? And perhaps coupled with that, the very specific question, were the World Bank actually to follow what apparently Mr. Malpass is thinking about doing and saying, you know, we're not going to be lending to China anymore? Would you view that as deleterious for future governance?

Well, you know, on that particular score, you know, China is not where other East Asian countries are that have grown very quickly, you know, but it is a middle income country. There's a case to be made that there could be some rebalancing of flows to and flows from China

and its support of the international institutions, which would also, you know, signal in a way that its leaders might find prestigious, you know, its growing stature. You know, but for China, I think there's always

been an issue of carrots and sticks. And those sticks can be sort of soft power sticks. So one of the things that Caroline and I both worked on, you at a much higher level in the Obama administration was the TPP. That was a great exercise in actually, you know, containing China through soft power

and also, you know, supporting regional economies that might feel bullied by China. And this is something that, you know, I think, I think if it had been thought about for more than three seconds, it would have been realized by the incoming Trump administration that this is something actually worth pursuing,

but it was not thought about. So for China, I think you do need to bring them into the system. You need to make them even more important stakeholders, but you also have to be very firm about the rules and about, you know, the sort of sticks

and about monitoring because, you know, it's a non-transparent system. It is inherently non-transparent and that's not gonna change anytime soon. Interestingly enough, TPP would have had mechanisms for China to join had it decided to play by the rules. But it would have had to, you know, subscribe to the rules of the system

that were predetermined. Theoretically, an influence lever that could have been used. Jean-Pisani Ferri, Italy and BRI, what do you make of that? I think we've got in Europe to wake up to a new reality, which is that, you know, we tended to separate

economic relationship from geopolitical relations and so we had a very simple-minded, very economist view of the world, which is not the case of the US, which is not the case of China and we have to wake up to a reality, which is that, you know, China has a view of the world and the US has a view of the world

in which they can leverage economic instrument for geopolitical reasons and so we have to, you know, respond to that. Now the, and so there's a concern that, you know, China is, well, now approaching or discussing with Italy

and there's a visit of President Xi Jinping in Rome, after actually also having entered into agreement for privatization in Greece or in Portugal that have led those countries to, you know, oppose the control of direct investment that some other European countries wanted to put forward.

So it's a new reality we have to adjust to. The big difference, I think, with the US, is that for Europe, it's a matter of, you know, avoiding to be dominated by this sort of more geopolitical approach of international relations.

It's not a matter of limiting, putting a brake on the development of China or any other country for reasons of rivalry. Which is, in fact, very much a case of the US. And in the US, in the recent amendment to the investment control regulation,

one of the reasons mentioned is to maintain technological leadership, which means that not only you want to object to investment that are politically motivated and that we should do the same, but you want to restrict the sort of the flow

of knowledge and technology to the rest of the world. And I think that's a big mistake. And the US wishes to do this without education, more educational investments of its own. It's restricting others, it's keeping others behind instead of forging ahead.

Caroline, you mentioned trade. I want to just, two quick questions and then we will open for just one or two audience questions. You mentioned trade. Certainly some of my colleagues in the media referred to the first big package of tariffs against China as the day, or a nail in the coffin of the WTO. So double question, essentially.

Do you think that the WTO can come back, can it become a vital governance institution despite Trump's and his administration's clear disregard for it? Or do you think we will see some sort of network

of bilateral, regional agreements, and to what degree can they provide an alternative? I think that the WTO, nobody's left the WTO yet, and I think that's quite important.

And I think that they have a lot of very good technicians and so on there. But blocking adjudication procedures by not appointing judges essentially undercuts the entire institution. Right, but you asked can it come back. I'm not claiming that it's operating normally, but I think that it could come back.

However, but I think the longer term threat to the WTO, which does require it to move, and I am kind of institutionally and because of all my experience, much more on the side of adaptability, flexibility norms than rules, the longer term problem is really that

there hasn't been an agreement between developing countries and developed countries about everybody working together. That was a critical issue that had to be got over in the climate space for Paris, and it hasn't been addressed in the WTO. And you cannot have the advanced economies,

and here I think Europe and the United States feel are in the same position with special agreements, arrangements for developing countries that are big traders and big economies like China, including like Indonesia, Brazil, and so on.

So China always wants to say we're a developing country, we're a poor country, we need to be treated that way, and that's a problem for those institutions. But it's not an insoluble one. Over time, it can be addressed. In the meantime, I think the WTO can be a place where countries come together to make specific pacts,

but not for a couple of years. Thank you. As we were speaking just now about US pressure vis-a-vis Europe, I was thinking, Moise Uppsfeld, about the fact that I've heard at least some people in Germany say, well, this whole Huawei thing, it's actually only because the US wants

to keep others down. In other words, they see it as part of Trump's overall mercantilist strategy. And that, to me, is testimony to what has happened to trust, even just in the two and a half years of his presidency. So my last question, before we take an audience question, would be whether you think the effects of Trumpism

are likely to outlast his presidency and do ongoing damage to global governance in the sense that trust is the currency of that system? Yeah, well, that sort of comes back to the initial question about the G20, that the level of trust is very low.

And since the Trump administration has come in, every single G20 meeting has been the US against almost everyone else on certain key issues, such as, is the IMF the center of the global financial safety net?

The US comes in, it red lines the communique and says, red lines that out. 19 countries put it back in. And it really, and repeatedly, keeps trying to do this. So it has led to people sort of just dreading these meetings and wondering if a communique

will actually be agreed on. I think in some areas, it's gonna be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle. If I look at the US, again, when we were working on TPP, we were basically, the opposition was actually

most of the Democratic Party. And there were a few Democrats in Congress who were for it. Republicans were on board. Now there seems to be an inter-party consensus against trade in the US. How is that going to affect the stability of our US position in the WTO going forward?

I don't know. And I think that also will affect other areas. So I worry that Trumpism is gonna possibly have a very long tail. To what degree do you think that what we're witnessing, and this is a question pretty much for this particular group of people in this room, what we're witnessing could hasten

the end of the dollar-centric order? Exploiting the dollar's position for political ends, to enforce sanctions, whatever,

cut countries off from US payments. I think that's the fastest way to hasten the dollar's demise as an international currency. Russia and China have talked about setting up alternative networks. But short of that, and provided the US remains a country

where basically the rule of law prevails, which we can't take anything for granted, the dollar is gonna be very hard to dislodge. The euro is not in a position to displace it. The RMB is certainly not. There's nowhere else to go. Its position is gonna be hard to break,

but with enough bad will, it could happen. That's not the kind of statement that moderators like to end panels on, but maybe the audience will help us get back to a glass half full kind of. Yes, please.

I wanted to ask your opinion on the G20 agenda. It's my impression that it's becoming too vague, too large, too full of topics, and away from the central and crucial issues that are really systemic and require global action,

like finance, trade, climate. They are inserting the future of work, the role of women, Africa, all very important issues. At the end, these issues allow the final communique to become extremely vague

and trying to avoid the basic issue. I wanted to know if you think that there is some hope that this, at least they can create a sort of a hierarchy of these topics. There are some on which there is a certain type of work, and the other is a different one. Thank you. Do we have another question in the audience?

Okay. People have their eye on the clock, no doubt. Ignacio, please. What do you think of the main form of, perhaps the only form of international cooperation

that at the moment seems to be active in Europe, the cooperation of governments aimed at undermining the commission in general and the competition rules of the commission in particular? What do you think of this international cooperation?

Well, Jean, would you like to start with an answer to both of those? I don't want to avoid this question. Well, the two sides, I mean, specifically the question of the competition rules, and I think it's, we shouldn't, we shouldn't,

I mean, the focus on the consumer that's embedded in the competition rule is right, and competition is about consumer welfare. Now, you can discuss whether to take more on board the constant stability of markets. You can discuss what the time horizon that needs to be adopted, what are the pertinent markets,

but all those are told, questions that are entirely internal to the competition issue. Now, there's another issue which is, do we want at some point for some issue, and that was certainly not the case for the railways to consider that for security reasons,

we want to allow a situation that where on competition ground, we would block a certain merger, but for national security reason, we should do otherwise. And that's not something that exists currently in European law, and I think that should be introduced. But that should be introduced, I think,

best within the commission, inside the commission. So we should have the high representative being able to say, I'm sorry, competition commissioner said this merger should be blocked for security reason, I object, and I ask the commission to consider the whole of the issue. But the bad thing is to compromise,

to start fudging the competition rules for reasons that have nothing to do with competition. G20 agenda too broad, you can take it, or Caroline, or whoever feels. On the G20, everybody, all the representatives in the Sherpensson begin every year by saying, we need to have a very focused communique,

we mustn't have very many issues on it, et cetera, et cetera. I ended up feeling differently from that because I discovered that it's possible to deal with some quite important issues that require action in governments, not at the level of leaders, but leaders saying something, having a half a phrase or a sentence in a communique

can set others working. I mentioned Ebola, I mentioned cyber crime. These are other things that, as well as the issues that you raised of trade and climate, which originally were rejected from the agenda as being not to do with the central questions.

So I think that if you, and the Japanese saying this year that they want to deal with the issue or they want to mention the question of marine plastics. Well, now that's a long way from, you know, imbalances, global imbalances, but it's also a global issue

that probably it's quite good if people, if a message comes from leaders to the various people, you then need to have the followup and you need to have the leadership and the push that goes into the systems of government in these various countries. So I'm okay with a pretty broad agenda

provided there are kind of action items and goals that go with it. And that it's right now, of course, the G20, as Maurice said, is in this difficult problem. I know we're short of time. I just wanted to make two quick points. One is about, or maybe three.

One is about the BIS, which we haven't mentioned and I don't know, maybe it's not polite to mention the BIS and the ECB, but I was very impressed with the way that the BIS went over a period of years from this very narrow, etiolated environment of G10 central banks to broadening, having, you know, meetings outside the G10,

having a branch in Singapore, I don't know, Mexico or whatever. And Andrew Crockett, I think, was the main one managing that expansion. And I think that was a very important way and it wasn't done with rules and treaty changes and all the rest of it. Second thing on Maurice's point about inclusiveness,

which I do think is really important for all of us to think about. And there is a role, as Ignacio knows, for central banks and regulators. And then lastly, I just want to say thanks very much to Ignacio for reaching out to me. We haven't seen each other for ages, but we worked together 25 years ago or more

when he was in the Bank of Italia and I was at the IMF. So thank you very much for that and congratulations for all your work. One last sentence. I just wanted to react to the point made by Maurice about the dollar and the euro. I think we were used to consider that the dollar was somehow a sort of public good,

with some US characteristics, obviously. You had this notion of the exorbitant privilege and the exorbitant duties. Somehow there was a balance and that was the attitude. And the attitude in Europe was that the international role of the euro,

that was nice to mention it, but there was no policy with this, the international role of the euro. The policy was complete neutrality. Now, I think it's being reconsidered. The consequences of the US using its currency in a different way, that we've got to reconsider.

And they are major obstacle to a wider international role of the euro, having to do with what is a safe asset, having to do with to what extent are we able to provide liquidity line to those using the euro outside the euro area. But I think this conversation has started.

And that's a consequence of the US behavior. Yeah, I mean, just two other points on that question. You know, one of the important things the US did during the financial crisis, which is to some degree endured, it was to extend swap lines, dollar swap lines. And this has been very much in the US interest

because it has promoted the countries to use the dollar as a funding currency. It has maintained that system. And I think in the current political climate in the US, that's not a foregone conclusion that these would be available, particularly to countries outside the big six central banks. The other way in which the US

couldn't undermine the dollar's role is by its leaders continuing to say they want a weak dollar. You know, if you go back to the late 80s and the period of, late 70s, and the period of dollar weakness that preceded Paul Volcker coming in as Fed chairman, that is when there was a lot of talk

about the substitution account, about getting rid of the dollar as a reserve currency, replacing it with SDRs. And that ultimately did not happen, in part because the dollar strengthened. Now if President Trump keeps bashing the Fed, keeps talking down the dollar, if markets react to that,

it could be a serious factor in discouraging dollar use. Thank you very, very much. Let's give this panel a very warm round. And that brings us to the end of our colloquium, so let me just say thank you very much

to all of the technicians, thank you to the bank for making this possible, but most especially, of course, thank you, Inatsu, for inviting all of us to participate in these truly insightful, very, very interesting discussions. Shall we briefly stand and all clap for Inatsu? Yes.

We wish you well.