Christian Sewing

We see developments in the UK.

And therefore, I think there are constructive discussions with our regulators.

So there is some movement.

Nevertheless, I think it's not only about regulation.

I think the most important is how can we ensure that Europe overall, but also Germany, is actually increasing the competitiveness and growth.

And therefore, we need to do more on the structural reform side, which goes way beyond bank regulations.

That is actually the topic which we need to push for, because at the end of the day, regulation is important, we need a level playing field, but the most important is the underlying growth, and therefore we need structural reforms in Europe.

It's both.

I personally think that the debt break alignment and adjustments which we have seen in Germany was the right step to do.

But only doing this is not the right thing.

Just increasing debt is not the right thing.

What you need to do is in parallel work on structural reforms that it makes sense for corporates, private individuals to invest.

And that has all about to do with tackling the problem of energy prices in Germany, reducing bureaucracy, making sure that we are doing bigger investments into infrastructure, that the approvals for new investments are not taking that long as it did before.

All that needs to be done.

Aligning or just growing by stimulus program will not be sufficient.

We need a pair of structural reforms.

And there I can see that actually the German government is taking the first steps.

Well, it's a result already of the COVID.

I think after COVID, people really thought far more about diversification.

We can see that German corporates, European corporates are very active in diversifying their supply chains, their production chains, and are also trying to invest more globally and less concentrated.