This fact demonstrates the scale of our outreach to the financial system in the euro area and its effectiveness in insuring against a systemic liquidity threat. 3. The third building block concerns the lengthening of the maturities of our refinancing operations. In a first step, we lengthened the maturities to up to six months.
Just over two weeks ago, we began to provide liquidity for up to one year. The first such operation, conducted in late June, led to a record amount of € billion of liquidity being supplied to the euro area’s banking system. This exceptional outcome amounts to around 5% of the euro area’s GDP and is a sign of banks’ enduring demand for liquidity security.