The European Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group launched today the European Institutional Investors Pact (EIIP) at the TechEU Equity Summit.

The Pact is a new voluntary framework designed to channel more long-term institutional capital into Europe’s technology and scale-up ecosystem. Thirteen institutional investors have already expressed their intention to channel investments into Europe’s innovation and scale-up ecosystem, including through the €15 billion European Tech Ch...

Thank you, Graeme, and thank you SWIFT for the kind invitation.

The theme of this year’s conference is digital finance for AI-driven economies.  This is an important topic for the IMF because an efficient and secure payments system is critical to economic growth and stability.

Clearly, as the theme suggests, the financial system, and payments in particular, will need to evolve. If AI is used as widely as proponents expect, a great deal of economic activity will be undertaken by AI agents rather ...

The EU’s growing network of trade agreements helps European businesses to access new export markets and creates a more predictable trade and investment environment, according to a report published today. The sixth Annual Report on the Implementation and Enforcement of EU Trade and Economic Security Policy, covering the year 2025, concludes that EU trade agreements play a crucial role in increasing the resilience and competitiveness of EU operators.

Preferential trade works

• At the end of 2025, t...

The State of the Union (SOTEU) address is an annual speech by the President of the European Commission to the European Parliament, setting the priorities for the Union for the year ahead.

President Metsola, Prime Minister Carney, Honourable Members,

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.‘ This is how Charles Dickens describes Europe in the days of the French Revolution. And it is also a fair description of the world we live in. The speed of change is incredible. The challenges exc...

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the G20 area grew by 0.7% in the second quarter of 2026, slightly down from 0.8% in the previous quarter, according to provisional estimates (Figure 1). This reflected a mixed picture across G20 countries for which data were available, with most recording a slowdown.

Among G20 economies with available data, the contraction in Saudi Arabia deepened, with GDP falling by 4.8% in Q2 2026, following a 1.4% decline in Q1. This mainly reflected a sharp decrease in oil ac...

Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at “Hofburg im Dialog – Economy, Europe, Resilience” in Vienna, Austria

Vienna, 14 September 2026

Let me begin with a story that starts in this city.

In this country, the years before 1873 have a name: the “Gründerzeit”, or “founders’ era”.

The old city walls had come down and the Ringstrasse was rising where they had stood. Railways were pushing out across the empire. New banks and joint stock companies were being founded by the hundred.

But mo...

Remarks by Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director at the Bank for International Settlement

Dear Fabio, dear Pablo, dear governors—thank you for inviting me here to share a few thoughts on the challenges faced by central banks as our stewards of monetary policy.

Over the past 20 years, we have seen the Great Moderation give way to the global financial crisis, followed by a long spell at the effective lower bound, followed by a succession of large shocks, from the pandemic to the war in the M...

Europe has plenty of world-class research, talent and creativity. However, too often ideas originating in Europe are turned into economic success by others, elsewhere. This is because European innovators face barriers here and find it difficult to bring their ideas to life. As a result, the Commission proposed a new European innovation act to help Europe’s most innovative ideas be developed, financed and scaled up in Europe.

To strengthen the EU innovation system, the proposal will address two m...

Surpluses and deficits reflect deeper choices about saving and investment across interconnected economies.

More than 80 years ago, John Maynard Keynes centered his work on the persistence of global imbalances. The great economist tried to resolve what he described as the “secular international problem” at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 through an international clearinghouse. But the conference’s final agreement included only a weaker set of remedies.

Concern about imbalances has waxed and ...

Despite lower gas storage levels compared to previous years, the Member States and the Commission consider there is no immediate risk for security of gas supply in the EU. In a meeting of the Gas Coordination Group (GCG) this afternoon, experts from the Commission and Member States confirmed that while the situation on global energy markets remains exceptional and requires close monitoring, it also differs significantly from that of 2021/2022. Today, the EU is better prepared, thanks to increase...