Within their mandate, they can choose responding actively to the crisis by rethinking and potentially revising the appropriate set of policy instruments, or, alternatively, they can be passive. Being passive is, however, not an innocent policy stance, but a policy choice itself with potentially harmful implications for price stability. As John F. Kennedy once observed, “There are risks and costs to action.
But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.” And in the ECB case, passivity is not an option if it means failing to reach our objective of price stability. It is our unequivocal duty, enshrined in the Treaty, to do whatever it takes within our mandate to fulfil our objective.