Margarita Delgado: Banks and society. Looking to the future

Speech by Ms Margarita Delgado, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Spain, at the Círculo Financiero de la Sociedad Económica Barcelonesa de amigos del país, Barcelona, 1 July 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good evening.

I would like to thank Fundación La Caixa for their kind invitation to me to take the rostrum today at the Círculo Financiero. It is firstly an opportunity to address an eminently distinguished audience. But it also allows me to visit Barcelona again, a city I know very well from my time as a bank supervisor and to which it is always a pleasure to return.

You know better than me that Círculo Financiero has, throughout its long history, always offered a forum for open and frank debate on current topics. It has sought to tackle, from a constructive and European-oriented approach, the problems and difficulties we face as a society.

Admittedly, the challenges before us at present are most significant ones. But it is no less true that Spain, throughout the history of this institution, has experienced and overcome even more turbulent times. Each of these convulsive periods was seen by our society as a crisis.