Non-standard monetary policy measures and crisis response as of 2007
Since July 2013 the Governing Council of the ECB has been providing forward guidance on the future path of the ECB’s interest rate policy conditional on the outlook for price stability. Providing forward guidance has been a material shift in the ECB’s communication on monetary policy. It has involved communicating not only how the ECB’s Governing Council assesses current economic conditions and the risks to price stability over the medium term, but also what this assessment implies for its future monetary policy orientation.
In recent years, the ECB has taken a number of non-standard monetary policy measures. In 2009 and 2011, the ECB launched two covered bond purchase programmes (CBPP, which ended in June 2010, and CBPP2, which ended in October 2012). From 10 May 2010 to February 2012 the ECB conducted interventions in debt markets under the securities markets programme (SMP), which was terminated in September 2012. In August 2012 the ECB announced the possibility of conducting outright open market operations (OMT) in secondary sovereign bond markets to safeguard an appropriate monetary policy transmission and preserve the singleness of its monetary policy. In June 2014, it announced a series of targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs) aimed at improving bank lending to the euro area non-financial private sector, excluding loans to households for house purchase, over a window of two years. In September 2014, the ECB announced two new purchase programmes, namely the ABS purchase programme (ABSPP) and the third covered bond purchase programme (CBPP3), aimed at enhancing the transmission of monetary policy, supporting provision of credit to the euro area economy and, as a result, providing further monetary policy accommodation. On 9 March 2015 the Eurosystem started the purchase, on the secondary market, of bonds issued by euro area central governments and certain agencies and international or supranational institutions located in the euro area under the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP). Combined, the ABSPP, the CBPP3 and the PSPP constitute the Expanded Asset Purchase Programme (EAPP), whose monthly purchases will amount to EUR 60 billion. They are to be carried out until the end of September 2016 and, in any case, until the Governing Council detects a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation that is consistent with its aim of achieving inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term.