Neither the quality of our institutions, nor the scope for generating or adopting innovative products and practices, should be materially adversely affected by an overhang of debt and somewhat overvalued house and farm prices.
With a view to providing a firm anchor to inflation expectations and facilitating public assessment of the Eurosystem’s monetary policy performance, the ECB Governing Council has announced a quantitative definition of its objective. Price stability has been defined as a year-on-year increase in the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) of less than 2%, measured on the euro-area-wide average.