Furthermore, they document the renewed tightening in euro area financing conditions that was heralded by the escalation of the sovereign debt crisis in the spring of 2010.
More recently, the FCIs point to a clear footprint of the non-standard monetary policy measures the ECB adopted since mid-2014, after the rate cuts over the preceding two years had coincided with broadly unchanged financial conditions.3 Yet their improvement from end-2011 onward stands in contradiction with the escalation of the sovereign debt crisis, a point I come back to shortly.