Finally, I will focus on the APP, which plays a central role among the policy instruments. The ECB’s monetary policy toolkit Over the last three years, the Governing Council has had to take bold measures to maintain price stability.
The context in which we launched this package of measures, in June 2014, was one in which a sustained period of disinflation could have morphed into one of outright deflation. The Governing Council had to move beyond its conventional policy instruments and instead deploy a set of unconventional tools that were tailored to the specific challenges of that time.