The program started with daily purchases of $ million, but when the exchange rate of the shekel against the dollar plunged in July 2008, we increased our daily purchases to $ million.
After that the exchange rate against the dollar depreciated over the course of the next six months by about 20-25 percent, taking the nominal and real exchange rates back towards but below the average of the years 2003-2007. 23  Lars Svensson had made this argument in suggesting a way out of Japan's deflation of the 1990s.