Both our programme of enhanced credit support, the main aim of which was to facilitate banks’ liquidity management and access to funding at a time when money markets in particular started to be dysfunctional, and the more recent Securities Market Programme, under which the ECB intervenes to ensure depth and liquidity in dysfunctional securities market segments, are ultimately aimed at reducing the risks to medium-term price stability arising from the possibility of “disorderly deleveraging” and the associated disruption of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy.
There is therefore a certain parallel and a common motivation in these programmes. The common motivation is the need to ensure as much as possible a proper transmission channel for monetary policy, even in difficult circumstances. A central bank cannot permit its chosen monetary policy stance not to be transmitted to the real economy.