But I want to emphasise that such an outcome would not mean that the public finances have been made worse off. The ongoing dynamic effects of the programme will have been to make it cheaper for the Government to issue its debt in the interim. More importantly, over the lifetime of the programme, it would have delivered great benefits to the public purse by stimulating the economy and avoiding deflation: the increase in taxes received as a result of higher nominal GDP should be an order of magnitude larger than any financial deficit on the purchases themselves. To genuinely assess the impact on the taxpayer, one would have to take these and other factors into account. The counterfactual story will never be known precisely but the  13  Speech available at http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2010/speech437.pdf. 14  The DMO’s objectives include: “to conduct its market operations, liaising as necessary with regulatory and other bodies, with a view to maintaining orderly and efficient markets and promoting a liquid market for gilts.” See page 31, “Debt and Reserves Management Report, 2010–11”, HMSO, March 2010. BIS Review 135/2010  5  scale of the boost to the economy means that the all-round financial benefits for the public finances should far outweigh any cash deficit that might be left at the end of the programme. The gilt sales programme will not be the only technical issue surrounding an exit from unconventional policies. The Bank is also likely to re-introduce its reserves averaging framework for commercial bank reserves, for example.
This is why part of our vision for 2020 is to support the development of pan-European instant payment services, so that customers can send and receive payments at the same speed with which they can send and receive e-mails. The Euro Retail Payments Board is a multi-stakeholder body which helps foster the development of an integrated, innovative and competitive market for retail payments in euro. This summer it mandated the payments industry to design a scheme for instant payment services by November 2015. The Eurosystem could also consider a possible service expansion in this context, at least on the settlement layer, in order to meet the needs of potential future instant payment providers. TARGET, T2S and SEPA have been important milestones on our journey towards European integration. The Eurosystem’s Vision 2020 will set out the next steps. The actions we take over the coming years will complement the European Commission’s project to establish a Capital Markets Union in Europe – a project which the ECB and the Eurosystem fully support. In fact, T2S and its harmonisation agenda have already laid the groundwork for such a union. With the action plan published at the end of September, the European Commission has transformed its vision into concrete steps. I am confident that through our joint efforts and complementary initiatives we can deepen financial integration and complete the Single Market in Europe in a lasting way. I have briefly outlined a few components of the Eurosystem’s Vision 2020.