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.

Prior to the global financial crisis starting in 2007, the Eurosystem’s operational framework for implementing monetary policy used to be a corridor system. This involved the ECB Governing Council setting three interest rates, which usually had the same distance from each other. The rates of the deposit facility and the marginal lending facility formed the lower and upper bounds of the corridor, respectively. The relevant key interest rate on the main refinancing operations was the middle of the interest rate corridor. This system aimed to steer short-term money market rates close to the main refinancing operations rate.

Notes on methodology

Explanatory notes

on the topic of Insurance corporations

Wie soll der Campus auf dem Gelände der Deutschen Bundesbank an der Wilhelm-Epstein-Straße in der Zukunft aussehen? Details zu den sechs eingereichten Entwürfen finden Sie hier.

The concepts and methodological standards for compiling external sector statistics are set out in numerous international manuals. These are currently being revised.

Confirmation of dates and topics of new online courses.

A lack of data is making it very difficult to estimate probabilities of default. Experts from 13 countries discussed different approaches, from the factoring in of certain variables to the development of algorithms. Only time will tell which of these will win out in practice.