After the financial crisis of 2008–09, and throughout the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area, the ECB implemented a number of standard and non-standard measures to ensure that the transmission of monetary policy stimuli to the economy would remain active, in the face of impairments in different financial market segments.
This is arguably an important difference with respect to the Japanese experience in the 1990s, where commentators have argued that non-standard measures could have been implemented earlier.11 Looking ahead, anchoring inflationary expectations is crucial to provide a stable environment for the decisions to invest and hire workers, and to avoid the deflationary pressures which exacerbated and prolonged economic stagnation during Japan’s lost decade.