A year and a half later, in June 2016, it also began to buy corporate bonds. So, the basic story is simple. Once the Eurosystem had come to the conclusion that the standard tools were not sufficient to reach our objective, it turned to non-standard tools. Asset purchases are one of those tools.
And they have made our job as central bankers even more complex than it used to be. The first challenge we faced was how to go about implementing the purchase programme. Interventions like this can have any number of unintended consequences. First, as a major actor in the markets for public and private bonds, we have to tread carefully.