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.

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.

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We could be on the verge of a global economic turning point, Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel said in an interview with the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. In this situation, we need more Europe, not less. Trump’s proposed trade tariffs could prove very painful for Germany. Should they be implemented, he said, we might even see negative economic growth next year. Mr Nagel considers European monetary policy to be on the right track.

Germany’s current account recorded a surplus of €22.6 billion in September 2024, up €5.5 billion on the previous month’s level. This was caused by the larger surplus in the goods account and especially by the shift to a surplus in invisible current transactions, which comprise services as well as primary and secondary income.

Tim ist mit seinem Team für die Bargeldversorgung und die Qualitätssicherung der Banknoten und Münzen zuständig. Im Video erläutert er, wie er zusätzlichdie Gelegenheit erhielt, Einblicke in die Bankenaufsicht zu gewinnen.