Research library · BIS
Central-banker speeches
The BIS central bankers’ speeches archive: 20,728 speeches by 1,021 named speakers, from 1996-09-10 to 2026-06-22, acquired as the BIS’s own bulk download. It is the largest corpus in the library and the analyst’s record of what central bankers actually said, across every major central bank, three decades, and every crisis in between. The archive is a BIS editorial selection of English-language texts, not a census of all speeches given.
Speeches per year, 1996–2026
The archive opens in 1996 and its final year is the acquisition cutoff, so the first and last bars are partial years of coverage, not quiet years at the podium.
Source: Bank for International Settlements, central bankers' speeches Counts from the FinObservatory text catalog, bis_speeches corpus. Methodology
Most-published speakers
The 20 speakers with the most speeches in the archive, with the years they span. The speaker field is the BIS metadata name as published; affiliations are not a separate field in the bulk file, so the ranking is by person, not institution.
| # | Speaker | Speeches | Active span |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jean-Claude Trichet | 478 | 1997–2011 |
| 2 | Mario Draghi | 337 | 2006–2019 |
| 3 | Amando M Tetangco, Jr | 272 | 2004–2017 |
| 4 | Benoît Cœuré | 254 | 2012–2019 |
| 5 | Ben S Bernanke | 252 | 2002–2014 |
| 6 | François Villeroy de Galhau | 228 | 2015–2026 |
| 7 | Zeti Akhtar Aziz | 224 | 1999–2016 |
| 8 | Andreas Dombret | 222 | 2010–2018 |
| 9 | Yves Mersch | 194 | 2002–2020 |
| 10 | Alan Greenspan | 192 | 1997–2005 |
| 11 | Christine Lagarde | 183 | 2019–2026 |
| 12 | Ardian Fullani | 182 | 2004–2014 |
| 13 | Ignazio Visco | 172 | 2007–2023 |
| 14 | Mark Carney | 166 | 2008–2020 |
| 15 | Benjamin E Diokno | 164 | 2019–2022 |
| 16 | Christian Noyer | 160 | 1999–2016 |
| 17 | William C Dudley | 160 | 2009–2018 |
| 18 | Jens Weidmann | 157 | 2011–2022 |
| 19 | Peter Praet | 146 | 2011–2019 |
| 20 | Ravi Menon | 144 | 2011–2023 |
Source: Bank for International Settlements, central bankers' speeches Metadata only. A small number of archive rows carry no speaker name and are excluded from this ranking (they remain in the corpus counts). Methodology
Most recent 50 speeches
Title, speaker, and date; each title links to the speech’s own page at bis.org, where the BIS publishes the full text.
Source: Bank for International Settlements, central bankers' speeches Metadata shown under BIS noncommercial terms; full text at bis.org. Methodology
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