What about the risk of the ECB itself incurring losses as a result of the new government bond programme? That’s another problem. One of the principles of our monetary policy is that our transactions should entail the least risk possible. Yet the Eurosystem will take on substantial risks by making these purchases.
Let me briefly comment on the recently released GDP statistics, which some see as confirming the weak economic recovery. The recent introduction of the chain index method for calculating the GDP deflator resulted in a downward adjustment of the real GDP growth rate from the figure calculated using the previous method.