When I say that our monetary policy stance is accommodating, it can be confirmed by a number of observations: we have real short-term interest rates which are very close to zero; nominal short-term interest rates are the lowest in the euro area since the Second World War, for example the German Bundesbank never went lower than 2.5%; there is abundant liquidity in the euro area with monetary aggregates growing twice as fast as the growth in GDP.
Businessmen complain that the ECB’s rate hikes came too early and might put the economic recovery of the euro area at risk. How can the ECB cope with that criticism? What we are doing is what our mandate commands us to do. But our mandate is not at all in contradiction with growth and job creation.