It helped to counteract the fragmentation, in that a large share of the overall liquidity uptake under the VLTROs came from banks in vulnerable countries. At the same time, the interest rate on these operations is indexed to the ECB’s main policy rate.
Do you see this as a way of getting back at those who criticised the ECB’s “psychorigidity” in the past? Jean-Claude Trichet: These criticisms turned out to have no basis, as we saw, and have, it seems to me, largely disappeared.