We will now report on the outcome of today’s meeting of the Governing Council, which was also attended by the Commission Vice-President, Mr Dombrovskis. Based on our regular economic and monetary analyses, we decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged.
We continue to expect them to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of our net asset purchases. Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, as decided on 10 March 2016, we have started to expand our monthly purchases under the asset purchase programme to € billion, from the previous amount of € billion.