Notwithstanding this consideration, some people are still troubled by the amount of portfolio investment abroad by Australian institutions and direct investment abroad by Australian companies, accusing them of turning their backs on Australia. I think the situation is a bit better than this.
And that made it much more difficult to implement a single monetary policy. So once again the ECB had to step in to ensure that monetary policy remained effective. It began to buy government bonds through its Securities Markets Programme, SMP for short. For a while the SMP helped to rein in uncontrolled surges in government bond yields.