In the years that followed, as a legacy of the debt crisis, banks in those vulnerable countries entered a drawn-out process of deleveraging aimed at shedding the most risky components of their balance sheets: loans to the economy. This, once more, impeded transmission of the stimulus introduced by OMTs and by the liquidity operations to the real economy.
It threatened to derail the very tenuous recovery that had started in 2013 and prompted inflation rates to drift downwards – and away from levels consistent with price stability. A third phase of the crisis started in 2014, as it became clear that the incipient recovery was too fragile and dependent on progress in transmission to warrant inaction on the part of the ECB.