In our case, and that of other countries too, the goal of QE programs was to raise the inflation rate from the negative rate that we feared. Here the inflation target was important: we were able to explain that even at a zero interest rate, inflation was expected to  21  The program was terminated at the end of July.
22  We intervened in the foreign exchange market for the first time in nearly ten years when the exchange rate appreciated very rapidly in March 2008, at a time when it was already clear that we were likely to go into a recession.