At its June monetary policy meeting the Governing Council will receive an update of the staff projections and a more complete information set on which it will be able to formulate its judgement on the distribution of risks around the most likely outlook for growth and inflation Overall, we remain firmly convinced that an extraordinary amount of monetary policy support, including through our forward guidance, is still necessary for the present level of underutilised resources to be re-absorbed and for inflation to return to and durably stabilise around levels close to 2% within a meaningful medium-term horizon.
You asked me to discuss with you today the dynamics of long-term interest rates. Over the past few decades long-term bond yields have been trending down in both nominal and real terms. While lower nominal rates in part reflect monetary policy among other factors, the decline i n real yields has been driven by structural factors.