Axel Weber

The CEO and I are now in our 8th year at the bank, that is a point in time where you need to start thinking about what is it that you are going to do and how you are going to pass the bank over to your successors.

I think in general, monetary policy normalization is not an issue for this cycle. It's for the next cycle, they won't get it done this time because the economy is weakening.

I think central banks are on hold, the downside... is that The ECB will never leave negative territory if they don't start raising rates this year.

The only bank that has any room to maneuver is actually the The F... by Axel Weber

The only bank that has any room to maneuver is actually the The Federal Reserve.

The issue is the current policy divergence which I think is driving some of this international volatility. My view is this can not last for long because we've never seen a decoupling, if the U.S. were to stay course the dollar would continue to rise and I think that would recouple the economies. So at some point you're going to see the impact of current policies starting to mitigate.

Unless we have this bifurcation of interests in Europe I think Europe will continue to face challenges.

I've just come from a meeting of the International Monetary Fund. There, the consensus is increasingly that a Greek default would be systemically controllable.

They should not do too much. by Axel Weber

They should not do too much.

There is going to be quite a bit of impact that is going to go beyond the first quarter and that is where fiscal response, providing businesses with some tax relievers, some emergency funding, that is going to be very important for putting businesses through.

They run a pretty tight system of controls on investment quotas and they could liberalize that temporarily and try to get investments going.

It might not tick all the boxes for everyone, but it will reassure the market, some of the 'investor strike' for the UK, where people waited for the ultimate resolution, we are seeing that disappear. People are coming off the sidelines. People are putting money to work again.