Mario Draghi, President of the ECB,
Vítor Constâncio, Vice-President of the ECB,
Frankfurt am Main, 3 September 2015
Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice-President and I are very pleased to welcome you to our press conference. We will now report on the outcome of today's meeting of the Governing Council. As usual, let me start with the decisions taken.
Based on our regular economic and monetary analysis, and in line with our forward guidance, the Governing Council decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged.
Our asset purchase programme continues to proceed smoothly. Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, following the announced review of the public sector purchase programme's issue share limit after the first six months of purchases, the Governing Council decided to increase the issue share limit from the initial limit of 25% to 33%, subject to a case-by-case verification that this would not create a situation whereby the Eurosystem would have blocking minority power, in which case the issue share limit would remain at 25%.
Underlying our monetary policy assessment was a review of recent data, new staff macroeconomic projections and an interim evaluation of recent market fluctuations. The information available indicates a continued though somewhat weaker economic recovery and a slower increase in inflation rates compared with earlier expectations. More recently, renewed downside risks have emerged to the outlook for growth and inflation. However, owing to sharp fluctuations in financial and commodity markets, the Governing Council judged it premature to conclude on whether these developments could have a lasting impact on the outlook for prices and on the achievement of a sustainable path of inflation towards our medium-term aim, or whether they should be considered to be mainly transitory.
