To counter these risk factors, it is essential that the ECB acts as a stabilising force and boost confidence by committing to the preservation of favourable financing conditions.
This commitment is delivered through our full set of monetary policy instruments: the low policy rate (together with the forward guidance that the Governing Council expects the key ECB interest rates to remain at their present or lower levels until we have seen the inflation outlook robustly converge to a level sufficiently close to, but below, 2 per cent within our projection horizon, and such convergence has been consistently reflected in underlying inflation dynamics); our asset purchase programmes – the APP and the pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) (including the commitment to adjust the purchasing pace under the PEPP to counter any 1/2  BIS central bankers' speeches  tightening in financing conditions that is inconsistent with countering the downward impact of the pandemic on the projected path of inflation); the calibration of our targeted longer-term refinancing operations (the TLTRO III programme) and our collateral policies.