The Crisis
This chapter offers a comprehensive account of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) actions in the early phases of the financial crisis. We show how, despite stubborn inflation pressures, the ECB responded effectively to post-Lehman shock, inter alia by quantifying the effect of moving to ‘fixed rate with full allotment’ lending in regular and longer-term operations. We nonetheless demonstrate that the potency of this response was partially constrained by the ECB’s ‘passive’ approach to liquidity provision—which hinged on demand from banks—and the ‘separation principle’ between interest rate decisions and liquidity operations. We lay out how these principles began to dissolve with the launch of the ECB’s first bond-buying programmes—the Securities Market Programme in 2010 and the Outright Monetary Transactions programme in 2012—and quantify the effects of these measures. In particular, we document the sequence of events that led up to President Draghi’s famous ‘whatever it takes’ announcement.