Overall, the available evidence suggests that the ECB’s rate forward guidance has been and continues to be an effective monetary policy tool and that the transmission of forward guidance to financial conditions and the economy has remained stable over time.
In part, this reflects the strong explicit conditionality embedded in the ECB’s evolving rate forward guidance statement as well as the interaction with asset purchases and other instruments. [11]  Negative interest rates Within our forward guidance framework, the negative interest rate policy has played a key role in enhancing this automatic stabilisation by lowering the effective lower bound.