In keeping with these anticipations, we also re-confirmed our forward guidance in its original formulation. Over the past two years our interest rate cuts were transmitted only unevenly across euro area countries, due to the fragmentation of financial markets along national borders. To address this problem, we adopted a series of non-standard measures.
The purpose of these was – and remains – a more effective transmission of the ECB’s interest rate cuts, so that our monetary policy can reach euro area companies and households. Our measures addressed those distortions in sovereign debt markets that were due to the redenomination risk and alleviated funding pressures of euro area banks.