All this suggests that the short-term interest rate going below zero does not pose the difficulties for monetary policy that we might have imagined. So could we reduce the main policy rates in the euro area even further? On this point we have been very clear: the current constellation of policy rates is for us the effective lower bound.
We do not intend to lower short-term policy rates further. And an important reason for this is that the lower bound for short-term rates is, in fact, not a hard constraint on monetary policy. 2  2  See B. Cœuré, 2014.