Well, Mr. President, dear Joe, I'm so pleased to welcome you in Brussels. You are back in Brussels, and America is back. We're feeling very good about it. An American time.

Welcome to EU Confidential. I'm Andrew Gray, Politico's EU editor in Brussels. And you might just have heard who's been in town this week and who's back in the international fold. Yes, you just heard Joe Biden, welcomed by European Council President Charles Michel, for an EU-US summit on his first trip abroad as US president. That was one of four

summits Biden attended in Europe over the past week. He started with the G7 in Cornwall,

went on to meet NATO and EU leaders here in Brussels, and then headed off to Geneva for a powwow

with Vladimir Putin. We'll sum up the sum total of the summit,

somehow, from both sides of the Atlantic in just a moment. And later in this episode, you'll hear

from Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, in an exclusive political

interview, where she focuses on gender equality

and how to break the glass ceilings that stop women getting to the top in the world of finance.

If you look at the landscape, and you look particularly at the financial sector,

which is the one that I have focused on recently,

in the private sector, only about 20% of board members are women,

and 2% of board members are women,

and 2% of the bank's top-level appointees are women.

So there is a long way to go.

Just before all of that, we wanted to say happy birthday.

Happy birthday!

To ourselves and kind of to you too.

This podcast is four years old this week.

And if you're a regular listener, we hope you'll consider this a kind of extra birthday for you too.

You're part of the gang.

And if dear old Queen Elizabeth can have two birthdays, so can you. I'm supposed to be as if you're enjoying.

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