Without further decisive policy action, sized to a scale appropriate to arrest the process, a downward re-anchoring towards a lower inflation rate could not have been ruled out. These considerations led the Governing Council to announce in January 2015 that the private-credit asset purchase programme that had already been decided over the previous summer would be expended in magnitude to include sovereign securities.
The shareholders of those companies should be asking the directors how they govern an organization without a good understanding of the risks the company is facing and without knowledge of a systematic approach to identifying, assessing, monitoring, and mitigating excessive risk-taking. I trust that none of the directors who participated in the survey were on the board of a financial services company.