It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the ECB Annual Research Conference, a flagship event that brings together researchers from academia and central banks with policymakers. This year’s conference, organised jointly with the Hoover Institution, bears a provocative title, “The Next Financial Crisis?”. The question mark, of course, is deliberate. It signals inquiry rather than prediction, and it frames our goal for the next two days, which is to examine how we can safeguard financial stability in an era of rapid transformation. We must keep two points in mind when thinking about this topic. First, throughout the ... (full story)