And the economy doesn’t work well when inflation is high. It is harder for businesses to plan, and people spend time protecting themselves against inflation rather than on more productive activities. And if inflation becomes ingrained in expectations, it requires higher interest rates and a large increase in unemployment to get it back down again.
The project, which will start on 1 November, will be implemented jointly by the ECB and nine national central banks (NCBs) of the euro area (the central banks of Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) on the basis of what we call a "Eurosystem approach". By "Eurosystem approach", we mean the following.