With current account fully convertible, except only minimal restrictions necessary to prevent a current account transaction being used as a camouflage for a capital account transaction, the entire focus of the regulatory framework for external sector transactions has been on the capital account transactions.
8  The burden of some of this debt has been partly mitigated by the low-for-long interest rate policy of the ECB – its policy rate has averaged well below 1 per cent for the past 5 years – which has brought the servicing costs of tracker mortgages well below where they were when the loans were contracted.