This crosscountry financial fragmentation hindered common monetary policy transmission to the whole of the euro area, and even posed a threat of a repeat of the 2012 sovereign debt crisis. In this setting, in March the ECB announced the launch of a new financial asset purchase programme (PEPP) which grants it the necessary flexibility to be able to concentrate its purchases at certain moments in time or on government bonds issued in certain jurisdictions, with a view to preventing fragmentation in monetary policy transmission. The volume of purchases initially announced under the PEPP was € billion for the whole of 2020. In June the term was extended up to at least June 2021, and the volume by a further € billion, making for a total of € trillion. Today we can safely say that the PEPP has been clearly successful in curbing financial market deterioration in all euro area countries. This is particularly visible in sovereign yields, which are now close to their pre-crisis levels, but it may also be perceived in other market segments such as corporate issuance. This decline in the cost of sovereign debt has amplified the room for manoeuvre of the fiscal authorities in all euro area countries, enabling them to take unprecedented measures to sustain the income of households and firms.
Whether this consensus is a result of the role played by Spanish economists, as Enrique Fuentes set out to demonstrate in his major work published by the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas, will be something for historians to decide. I would, however, venture to say that in the economic debate in Spain heterodox positions, or those furthest removed from the central strand of current economic thought, are relatively marginal. Concerning qualitative aspects, I have no doubt that another of the factors behind Spain's dynamism is the improved management of Spanish firms. And behind this lies a process in whose beginnings Barcelona was a driving force. I refer here to the expansion and quality of our business schools, which enjoy great prestige internationally. In the business school rankings of recent years, three Spanish institutions have systematically been in the top 30 worldwide. I would not wish to conclude this review of the factors contributing to the momentum of the Spanish economy in the past 20 years without referring to the important role decentralisation has played. Decentralisation is not free from risks - and I shall in fact deal with some that are most relevant to us but it has acted in Spain as a powerful economic, social and cultural dynamo, in a similar way to what happened in post-war Germany with the creation of the Länders. ***** Let us look now to the future.