However, the success of the ECB’s extraordinary measures must not make us forget the difficulties that monetary policy in the euro area has faced in recent years. The global financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis have brought risks for the Eurosystem’s de facto independence that it would be naïve to ignore or underestimate. I will mention two of them.
The first concerns financial autonomy and derives from the fact that the unconventional measures have expanded the size of the ECB’s balance sheet, though far less, at present, than those of the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan. The quality of the securities held or accepted as collateral for bank refinancing has declined.