Mr. Klaus Regling:

Obviously monetary policy is the same for every country in the euro area. We also know - and this was known to people who worked a lot on this and to the European Commission when I was there, as we wrote about it - monetary policy is often pro-cyclical, unavoidably. Countries that grow stronger than the average also typically have higher inflation rates than the average. As a consequence, they have lower real interest rates. The opposite is also true. Countries that do not grow so fast have lower inflation rates and, therefore, higher real interest rates. This means there is a pro-cyclical impact from being in a monetary union, coming from the monetary conditions. This is no surprise. We knew it when monetary union started. It also happens in regions of large countries, such as in the United States. The mid-west or Florida can have very different monetary conditions and also typically-----