Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Paris for this GIC Central Banking Series conference. This tenth GIC conference in partnership with the Banque de France is, as the previous ones, a very promising opportunity for professionals and monetary policy makers to exchange views, especially in the current euro area context.
It has been almost four years now since the Eurosystem incorporated several new instruments to combat the deflation risks that threatened the euro area in the wake of the crisis. One of our important tools was our Asset Purchase Programme (also referred to as APP – the euro-area version of Quantitative Easing) that was announced in its full blown version in January 2015. Looking ahead, our net asset purchases will stop when we see a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation (“SAPI”). We are not there yet, but we are more and more confident that the three criteria of this “SAPI", namely convergence, confidence, and resilience, will be met. So, the time when our net asset purchases will end is approaching – and as I already said, whether it will be in September or in December is not a deep existential question.
