One outcome of the financial crisis was the ECB’s controversial asset purchase programme. The Governing Council has indeed decided to stop purchases, but only very slowly. Meanwhile German social security funds have been suffering enormously from the negative interest rates for a long time. Shouldn’t you be moving more quickly? Ending the asset purchase programme is a major first step.
Asset valuations Misaligned asset prices are notoriously difficult to detect in a timely fashion, and no single metric or set of metrics can consistently and reliably identify stretched valuations. Nonetheless, it is clearly worthwhile to track a wide range of metrics and to view them in the context of their historical norms.