Hence, the ECB cannot and should not turn a blind eye to risks to financial stability. The Treaty clearly outlines a contributory role for the ECB in maintaining financial stability. After all, financial stability and price stability are functionally connected.7 They are linked in good times – and they are linked in bad times.
Both traditional statistical datasets and our models proved at times inadequate to support the decision-making process, reflecting long time lags, linear assumptions and the absence of more granular information. These events increasingly boosted the efforts in policy circles to obtain timelier and richer data for policy analysis, in short big data.1 This push towards more granular information was not a revolution, however.