Not acting would, in fact, have amounted to deflecting responsibility for our mandate and risked accepting the kind of economic disorder experienced during the Great Depression, as mentioned in my introduction. On that account, our balance sheet took on a more prominent role as a stabilising instrument.
The novelty of deploying the central bank balance sheet as an instrument was immediately met with substantial scepticism. First, there was apprehension about moral hazard: after all, the ECB expanded credit to banks at a time when they were under scrutiny for having precipitated the crisis in the first place.