Pablo Hernández de Cos: Testimony before the Parliamentary Budget Committee

Testimony by Mr Pablo Hernández de Cos, Governor of the Bank of Spain and Chair of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, before the Parliamentary Budget Committee in relation to the Draft State Budget for 2022, Madrid, 25 October 2021.

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

Ladies and gentlemen,

I appear once more before this Committee for the parliamentary presentation and discussion of the State and Social Security Budget (hereafter, the Budget) for 2022.

Let me first briefly clarify a point concerning the content of my address. As a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB), I am today bound by the so-called "quiet period" prior to the meetings at which monetary policy decisions are taken. Accordingly, my thoughts should not be interpreted as indications of the monetary policy outlook.

On this occasion, the circumstances of my appearance are, fortunately, notably different from those we were facing in autumn 2020. Still fresh in our thoughts then was the memory of the harshest phase of the pandemic in Spain. Precisely a year ago, moreover, the second wave of the virus was hitting us hard and the use of the first vaccines against COVID-19 had still not been approved.