It is a pleasure to return to this Committee for our regular dialogue. When we last met in February, inflation had remained close to the ECB’s 2% target for over a year, and euro area economic activity was showing solid growth momentum. Only a few days later, war broke out in the Middle East, reminding us how quickly external shocks can reshape the economic outlook. The topic you have chosen for today’s exchange – how monetary policy should be conducted in an environment of heightened geopolitical tensions and frequent supply shocks – is therefore particularly timely. In my remarks, I will first review what the incoming data tell us about the euro area economy and outline our latest monetary policy decisions. I will then explain in more detail how our monetary policy strategy is guiding us in responding to shocks such as the one we face today. ECB's President Lagarde: No evidence yet of de-anchoring or second-round effects that warrant a more forceful policy action *LAGARDE SEES NO NEED FOR MORE FORCEFUL ECB RESPONSE TO IRAN WAR ECB'S LAGARDE: WE ARE CONFIDENT THAT, WITH APPROPRIATE MONETARY POLICY ACTION, INFLATION WILL RETURN TO TARGET ECB's President Lagarde: ECB is 'well positioned' to navigate the situation

Thank you, Beth Anne, and I would like to welcome everyone to the fifth installment of this Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar.1 Over the years, this gathering has aimed to bring together different perspectives to better understand the forces shaping the dollar's central role in the global financial system. Last year's conference, for instance, focused on global investor allocation to U.S. safe assets and their liquidity in a time of geopolitical and technological change. This year, we are here to discuss the implications of financial innovations, especially digital assets such as stablecoins, for the international roles of the U.S. dollar. One striking feature of these discussions has been how rapidly the underlying questions have evolved since the first conference in the series. While the traditional drivers of the central role of the U.S. dollar in the global monetary system—from the size, strength, and depth of the U.S. economy and financial markets to trust in U.S. institutions and rule of law—remain critically important today, the environment around these drivers is changing rapidly. Technological innovation is increasingly altering how households and businesses interact with dollars, whether it is through holding new types of assets or through changes to the payment rails by which dollar-denominated assets are transferred, intermediated, and settled. Distributed ledger technologies and tokenized assets, such as stablecoins, are creating new channels for global dollar intermediation that operate alongside, or sometimes in conjunction with, traditional banking and payment systems. As a result, the dollar's international role is also evolving. The private sector is moving rapidly to expand access to dollar-denominated assets, innovate in new financial services, and explore potential business opportunities that perhaps did not make sense with legacy technologies. In doing so, there will be complements to the traditional financia Fed's Waller: Dollar’s global role changing with technology Fed Governor Waller did not comment on the economic or monetary policy outlook in his remarks.