The capital required for an economy based on agriculture and artisan-based manufacturing had been in the form of land, seed, basic tooling and the like. Traders needed working capital in order to purchase goods in one place and move them to another for sale, and various financial devices arose to assist this.
To illustrate this, let me go back to 2005. In that year, the signals from the economic analysis remained rather mixed and our monetary analysis was indicating upward risks to price stability. This led us to increase interest rates in December 2005 – a move widely criticised, also by a number of ECB watchers.