·  Thirdly, I shall discuss the motivation behind the decision to cut official interest rates on the 10th of May this year as I believe that this offers an interesting example of when surprising the markets is unavoidable. In the discussion of the interrelationship between monetary policy and financial markets one can see two distinct strands in the argument.
The first is that the monetary authority leads the financial markets. In this case monetary policy leads by signalling its intentions to – and impacting on – the financial markets. In the case of the ECB our intentions are clearly signalled to market participants via our stability oriented monetary policy strategy.