on the topic of Interest rates on deposits and loans

To collateralise all credit operations, the Eurosystem requires counterparties to provide adequate eligible assets in accordance with Article 18.1 of the Statute of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). Assets need to fulfil a number of criteria to be accepted as eligible collateral by the Eurosystem. 

In early 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) initiated the Financial Soundness Indicators (FSI) project in response to the financial market crises of the late 1990s.

The publication of the following indicators is prescribed in the SDDS Plus data category "Central Bank survey".

Operating and support hours of the Collateralmanagement Access Portal (CAP)

With the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007 and the turmoil it brought about in the international banking system, trust between commercial banks increasingly dwindled, which significantly hampered the redistribution of liquidity via the interbank market that is necessary for a functioning corridor system. Banks in the euro area began to hoard liquidity or not lend it indiscriminately to banks that were in need of liquidity, meaning that the short-term money market no longer facilitated the smooth distribution of liquidity. The volatility of short-term interest rates went up significantly. As a result, the ECB Governing Council adopted a series of non-standard monetary policy measures, thereby changing the way in which the operational framework is used to implement monetary policy.

The European sovereign debt crisis was characterised by the fact that some euro area countries, owing to their high levels of debt – caused in part by efforts to counter the consequences of the global financial crisis – experienced difficulties refinancing their debt and, in some cases, lost access to capital market funding. In order to protect monetary policy transmission and safeguard sufficient liquidity provision for the financial system, the ECB Governing Council adopted various non-standard measures during the course of the crisis that went beyond the scope of the usual operational framework at that time.

The Eurosystem’s monetary policy measures in the years following the European sovereign debt crisis were shaped, in particular, by a prolonged period in which inflation rates were well below the Eurosystem’s target. Against this backdrop, the ECB Governing Council decided, starting in 2014, to conduct various targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs) and launch temporary monetary policy purchase programmes in addition to the existing operational framework.

The Eurosystem’s monetary policy from 2020 was shaped by the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in inflation from 2021. This ultimately led to a series of Eurosystem policy rate hikes totalling 450 basis points (from July 2022 to September 2023).