11 Similar developments have been found for the US and other industrialised economies, but the gap in the euro area has been more persistent than in the US. The persistent divergence between services and goods inflation in the euro area clearly reflects a weakness in productivity growth in services activities.
But it’s the asset purchases that we’re stopping. € trillion is not an insignificant amount, and our asset purchases have been very effective. However, we’re going to keep interest rates very low, at their current levels, in other words close to zero, at least through the summer of 2019.