It's always great to be here in Luxembourg for our Eurogroup meeting. Allow me to give you a quick summary of everything we discussed. Under our first item, we discussed the macroeconomic and budget situation in the euro area, particularly with regard to the upcoming international meetings in Washington, which we will be attending next week. We agreed that while the level of uncertainty continues to remain high, the euro area itself is resilient. The Commission and the ECB briefed us on their work which indicated that growth had been better in the first half of the year than was expected. Ministers shared their views on the impact of the stronger euro which has appreciated strongly against the dollar, particularly in the first half of the year, and we will continue to monitor exchange rate developments. On the fiscal side, budget preparations are taking centre stage in the member states, and many ministers, including myself, have presented their national budgets this week. Even though our regular discussion on draft budget plans is scheduled for later in the year, coordination of our budget policies remains essential. We also discussed recent events and we will continue to follow developments closely. We then welcomed our non-euro area colleagues to continue our meeting in inclusive format. We had an important assessment of where we are on Capital Markets Union which remains one of our major priorities. It was the first annual stock-taking exercise since our statement last spring, which gave us an opportunity to see what progress we're making, particularly at a national level. And we can now see the number of new initiatives being taken, both at the EU and national level. This is very consistent with the Eurogroup statement, which was quite clear on the fact that a multi-layer approach is necessary, consisting of bottom-up efforts and top-down EU initiatives. We heard from Croatia regarding the work that they are doing in the consolidation of market infrastructure. We heard from Portugal on an initiative about offering companies a different understanding regarding how IPOs can be executed. Then I gave my colleagues an update on our work in Ireland on the establishment of our new autoenrollment retirement system which we call My Future Fund. The Commission updated us on their recent EU initiatives. While we're making some progress we have an awful lot more to do. We then turn to the second item regarding stablecoins, with a focus on recent developments and their implications for the euro area. We have seen growing interest from established financial institutions and corporate actors in stablecoins and we're aware of the growth of this sector. We know that it's very likely that these digital assets will play an increasing role in the operation of financial markets. And with this in mind, we exchanged views regarding both opportunities and risks, and we're now going to come back to this subject shortly, particularly given the recent progress we made on the digital euro. We concluded with a short information point where I updated our colleagues on the letter I will be sending to President Costa in advance of the Euro Summit, that will be taking place the week of 20 October 2025.
| 
