Your Excellencies,
Dear Guests,
Ten years ago, in mid-September 2008, the Lehman Brothers’ collapse became the trigger of the global financial crisis.
The main cause of the global financial crisis was, in my opinion, excessive deregulation, which fuelled speculative bubbles on many markets, primarily on the derivatives markets comprising mortgages. That crisis has thrown US and EU in the midst of financial turmoil, leading to recession, deflation, and forcing central banks to take unorthodox measures, including quantitative easing, which led to negative real and even nominal interest rates. Since then, US and EU have recovered, but the exit from these unorthodox policies proves to be harder in the EU, particularly because some countries are not better off in terms of public debt than they were before the crisis.