Under this framework and, as I have said earlier, in a setting in which inflationary risks have tended to increase over the last few months, in March we discontinued net purchases under our pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) and we agreed to gradually reduce net purchases under our asset purchase programme (APP). In June we decided that as the three conditions established by our forward guidance for raising interest rates had been met,5 net purchases under the APP would end on 1 July, and we informed of our intention to raise policy rates in July and again at our September meeting.6 In July, we decided to raise all three ECB policy rates by 50 basis points (bp), taking the deposit facility rate to 0%, thus moving out of negative territory for the first time since 2014. This was a larger increase than signalled at the previous meeting, for two reasons. First, the updated assessment of the risks to inflation, which included the materialisation of certain upside risks in the short term relative to the June projections. Second, we took into account the reinforced support for the effective transmission of monetary policy provided by the new Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), which was approved at that same meeting. Subject to fulfilling established criteria, the TPI will enable the Eurosystem to make secondary market purchases of securities issued in jurisdictions experiencing a deterioration in financing conditions not warranted by country-specific fundamentals, to counter risks to the monetary policy transmission mechanism to the extent necessary.
Indeed, from 2008 to 2014 the Banco de España prepared a considerable number of releases, articles and reports on the crisis and the measures adopted, which were available in print or on our website no sooner were they drafted. That is to say, the Bank had already prepared and published extensive information on and various analyses of the crisis; but what was missing was an orderly overview, in terms of both the timeline and the different themes, addressing the key macroeconomic, financial, regulatory and supervisory aspects. The imbalances built up in the Spanish economy in the expansion prior to 2008 Allow me first to refer to the build-up of macroeconomic and financial imbalances in the expansion years prior to the crisis, linked most significantly to private-sector debt. In its opening chapter, the Report indicates that an intense process of indebtedness unfolded in Spain from 2001 up to 2007, as reflected in Table 1.1 (p. 66). The figures for the period 2001-2007 are as follows: set against nominal GDP growth of 67%, credit to the private sector increased by 221%, concentrated especially in the real estate sector, where growth of 250% in house purchase loans and of 513% in the case of credit to construction and real estate services companies was recorded. Peak growth in credit was in 2005 and 2006. In those two years, credit to the private sector grew by 60%, that earmarked for house purchases by 65% and that to construction and real estate services firms by almost 100%, i.e.