The Eurosystem provided advice for the design of these measures, in the form of recommendations, for instance on the pricing of recapitalisation and of government credit guarantees, which aimed at ensuring that such measures would contribute to safeguarding financial stability and restoring an adequate flow of credit to the private sector, while preserving a level playing field within the Single Market to the maximum extent possible.
The implementation of the bank support measures has been gradual over the past few months. In the euro area, only one third of the commitments for capital injections had been used until the end of April and a smaller fraction, less than 18%, of the commitments to guarantee new bank debt have been called for.