Euro area citizens can be certain that we remain alert to any risk to price stability. We have always delivered price stability in the past – indeed, the average rate of inflation in Germany since the launch of the euro has been the lowest since the 1950s. And we will continue to deliver price stability in the future.
This belief resulted in what we now call the great inflation of the 1970s, a period of significant instability. The lesson we learned in Europe was that fine-tuning policies are ineffective and produce very poor and undesirable results.