The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 posed unprecedented challenges for central banks across the world in the pursuit of their statutory mandates. A main feature of central banks’ response to the crisis was the deployment of additional, and in some cases novel, monetary policy instruments. One of these instruments was what’s known as “quantitative easing”.
Compared with the March 2009 ECB staff macroeconomic projections, the ranges have been revised downwards, in particular for 2009. A substantial negative carry-over effect from the previous year and the very weak result for the first quarter of 2009 significantly contributed to this downward revision.