The National Bank of Cambodia and Banque de France convened 26 central bank governors in Phnom Penh on 28 May 2026 for the 28th meeting of Francophone central bank governors, on the theme of central bank autonomy facing state and public expectation. The keynote went to European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, with Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau presiding alongside National Bank of Cambodia Governor Chea Serey. The bank said it was the third time Cambodia has hosted the conference, after 1996 and 2011.
Lagarde directed part of her address to the central banks in the room that have operated under harder conditions than the institutions of the developed world. “You have long practised the work that has now become the task of all. We have more to learn from your experience than the other way around,” she said.
The remark followed her account of those central banks: institutions that built credibility without a long established heritage, weathered frequent and asymmetric shocks in commodities, capital and climate, and defended monetary independence under tight fiscal constraints. Those were challenges, she said, that others have only recently begun to encounter.
She built the point from the ECB’s own history. The framework that created the bank in 1998, she said, gave it no credibility of its own; that had to be earned over a quarter of a century, through the sovereign debt crisis and the 2022 tightening. Legal independence supplied the mandate, in her account, and the crises supplied the authority to use it.
Lagarde separated two forms of the thing under discussion: independence written into statute, which she called de jure, and the demonstrated capacity to resist interference, de facto. Over the past decade, she said, de facto independence has deteriorated in almost half of central banks in countries that account for 75 percent of global GDP. She set three conditions for protecting it: a clear mandate with price stability first, direct communication with citizens, and room for manoeuvre resting on fiscal responsibility and a resilient financial system.
Her text named Cambodia once, as the host city, and her remarks on constrained central banks addressed the assembly as a group.
The host central bank carried its own monetary record into the room. Foreign currency deposits made up 85.1 percent of Cambodia’s broad money in 2024 and about 91 percent of total deposits, figures the National Bank of Cambodia published in its 2024 financial stability review. Dollarization at that level continues to limit the effectiveness of monetary policy, the IMF said.
The National Bank of Cambodia runs a de-dollarization strategy the IMF described as aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of monetary policy. It narrows the interest-rate corridor in riel, expands riel-denominated lending under a target of about 10 percent to limit currency mismatches, shifts public salaries toward the riel, and extends the Bakong payment system.
The 2024 figures the bank carried into the conference included inflation of 0.8 percent, the lowest in more than a decade; broad money growth of 17.5 percent without inflationary pressure; a riel that averaged 4,071 to the dollar after appreciating 0.9 percent; and international reserves of USD 22.5 billion, about seven months of imports.
Her argument turned on how credibility is built: less through words than through accumulated experience, the sense that commitments once made are kept. Lagarde addressed the room about credibility built without inherited heritage, under asymmetric shocks and tight fiscal margins. The bank that convened that room operates under its own documented constraint, high dollarization, and publishes the strategy by which it is working through it. The experience she told the developed world it had more to learn from was, in the host’s case, already on the record.
