The Monetary Panel, chaired by Wim Boonstra (Netherlands), met on 18 April 2008 in Warsaw at the invitation of ELEC’s Polish section, which had taken responsibility for the first part of the programme and attracted a number of its members and guests next to Panel members from eight countries. They heard in succession speeches, followed by discussions, on prospects for Poland joining EMU by Katarzyna Kurowska, Finance vice-minister; on Poland’s banking sector by Wlodzimierz Kicinski, CEO of Nordea Bank in Poland; and on the international credit crisis by  Ewlin de Groot, Head financial markets research at Rabobank. The Panel will next meet in Brussels on November 7.

The Cahier Comte Boël n° 13, whose genesis goes back to the Panel’s Rome meeting in March 2007 and which deals with “Pan-EU Retail Banking: what industry wants and consumers need”, came out in June in both electronic (accessible on ELEC’s website http://www.elec-lece.eu/C1Doc_B13.pdf) and printed versions. It was publicly presented at a meeting jointly organized in Brussels with the European Banking Federation last July 8.