Newspress

Dear Edmond, dear members of the Euro50 group,

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you this evening. It is a great pleasure to be here.

Our monetary policy meeting in January this year was marked by two innovations. The Governing Council decided to expand its asset purchase programme to include public sector securities. And for the first time, a summary of that meeting's deliberations was published.

These decisions had the appearance of watershed moments - we had never before made purchasing government bonds a central tool of monetary policy [1], nor had we provided accounts of our monetary policy meetings. But both decisions were in fact the logical extension of our monetary and communication policies over several years, and in particular when our interest rates reached the effective lower bound.

With interest rates at the lower bound, both the tools and the communication of monetary policy have to change. Asset purchases become the logical next step to expand the monetary policy stance; and enhancing transparency becomes the logical way to steer expectations and ensure accountability in an unprecedented new environment.

In other words, what took place in January was not a revolution but an evolution. And what I would like to talk about this evening is how our policy has evolved in particular in terms of transparency and accountability, with a special focus on the publication of our accounts.

(...)