Forward guidance, asset purchases and longer-term refinancing operations over the past decade have helped mitigate the limitations generated by the lower bound and will remain an integral part of the ECB’s toolkit, to be used as appropriate. We have also made important changes to our analytical framework.
This framework provides the foundation for our monetary policy decisions, including the regular proportionality assessment of the effectiveness, efficiency and side effects of our measures. Historically, the ECB has been known for its “two pillars”, which identified risks to price stability as originating from two distinct domains: the “economic analysis” and the “monetary analysis”.