Granting a “pandemic” waiver to Greek government bonds to be used as collateral for Eurosystem refinancing operations and the inclusion of GGBs in the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) have helped to reduce spreads of Greek government debt to pre-crisis levels, thus improving financing conditions for banks and non-financial corporations.
So in late 2011 the ECB decided on LTROs to tackle the problems of interbank funding, since the risk of the euro area falling apart in summer 2012 led Mario Draghi to make his famous statement in London and prompted the ECB to come up with outright monetary transactions (OMTs), a tool intended to prevent self-fulfilling financial crises from pushing a country to leave the euro.