When we took the decision to purchase sovereign bonds in January, we said that not more than 33% of a country’s debt would be bought by the Eurosystem. And that’s including ANFA.
Was it a change in trend or just one quarter’s noise? This isn’t always easy to know. Detecting structural change in the economy is even more difficult. It depends on the variability of those learning-and-response processes at the micro level. One might think that the presence of variable lags would make observers more reluctant to conclude the economic structures have changed.