Finally, the newly inaugurated covered bond purchase program equally seems to bear first fruits. The announcement of the ECB program in May 2009 has led to a significant pick-up in the primary market that had seen only few new emissions after September 2008.
Remarkably, new bonds have not only been issued in countries with traditionally large markets for covered bonds like Spain, France or Germany, but also in the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal where covered bonds had so far played a limited role only. 9 The purchase programme also impacted on prices.