Mr. Mario Draghi:

I thank the Deputy because he makes the ECB seem very powerful and more powerful than it is. Removing governments is not the task of the ECB but it is the task of the voters of the different countries which elect them. It is the task of parliaments but certainly not that of the ECB.

The Deputy is referring to the fact that under certain conditions the ECB cannot continue to support a country through bond purchases or the provision of emergency liquidity assistance, which is a decision of the national central bank by the way and not of the ECB. The ECB has rules. It lends money against collateral to solvent banks. If banks are not solvent the ECB cannot lend money. If the collateral quality drops below a certain level, that collateral can no longer be accepted and often this collateral is formed by government bonds. To the extent that the policy of a certain country affects the value of these government bonds, the policy of a country becomes important for maintaining the support of the ECB. That has been the rule according to which the ECB has behaved in the many instances the Deputy mentioned. Of course the relationship between different countries and liquidity support can take different shapes but the substance of it amounts to what I have said before. The policy affects the quality of the collateral and the collateral is fundamental to maintaining the liquidity support but it is not that the ECB wants to dictate a policy.

By the way, in answer to a previous question I was asked, I should say that recently the ECB has been carving a different role out for itself in the policy dialogue with countries. It is much more limited to the financial stability part of the policy dialogue, unless it is extended to other parts such as the fiscal part. In other words, it is concerned with the financial stability and it is only concerned with fiscal sustainability only insofar as it affects financial stability. The ECB will not talk about different structures and operations or other such issues which we used to do in the past in the early versions of the Troika.