An analysis by the economists Viral Acharya, Tim Eisert, Christian Eufinger and Christian Hirsch.7 for example, shows that the Eurosystem’s OMT programme has impaired credit allocation in the euro area. The authors argue that the announcement of possible purchases of financially distressed governments’ bonds has stabilised the prices of such bonds and thus also the assets side of bank balance sheets.
The authors say that the banks that have been shored up in this way have granted loans to less productive firms, thus adding to an inefficient allocation of credit. But that is not the only respect in which government bond purchases targeted at individual 4/9  BIS central bankers' speeches  countries’ risk premiums raise problems in the euro area.