The Governing Council also offered additional longer-term refinancing operations including, naturally, the three-year refinancing operations at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 in particular. It also reduced the rating threshold for certain types of monetary policy collateral, thereby giving banks greater scope for taking out Eurosystem refinancing loans.
This is already part of the monetary policy strategy of the ECB’s Governing Council: The separate analysis of money and credit growth provides a very useful toolset for the early detection of rising risk potential in financial markets.