Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the Hearing of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 3.2% year over year in May, up from a 2.8% gain in April. Higher prices for gasoline continued to drive the acceleration in the headline ...

Thank you, Beth Anne, and I would like to welcome everyone to the fifth installment of this Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar.1 Over the years, this gathering has aimed to bring together different perspectives to better understand the forces shaping the dollar's central role in the global financial system. Last year's conference, for instance, focused on global investor allocation to U.S. safe assets and their liquidity in a time of geopolitical and technological change. This year, we are here to discuss the implications of financial innovations, especially digital assets such as stablecoins, for the international roles of the U.S. dollar. One striking feature of these discussions has been how rapidly the underlying questions have evolved since the first conference in the series. While the traditional drivers of the central role of the U.S. dollar in the global monetary system—from the size, strength, and depth of the U.S. economy and financial markets to trust in U.S. institutions and rule of law—remain critically important today, the environment around these drivers is changing rapidly. Technological innovation is increasingly altering how households and businesses interact with dollars, whether it is through holding new types of assets or through changes to the payment rails by which dollar-denominated assets are transferred, intermediated, and settled. Distributed ledger technologies and tokenized assets, such as stablecoins, are creating new channels for global dollar intermediation that operate alongside, or sometimes in conjunction with, traditional banking and payment systems. As a result, the dollar's international role is also evolving. The private sector is moving rapidly to expand access to dollar-denominated assets, innovate in new financial services, and explore potential business opportunities that perhaps did not make sense with legacy technologies. In doing so, there will be complements to the traditional financia Fed's Waller: Dollar’s global role changing with technology Fed Governor Waller did not comment on the economic or monetary policy outlook in his remarks.