Carlos Costa: ECB was “decisive” for the Euro Area stabilization

  • ECO News
  • 8 May 2017

This Monday, Carlos Costa spoke at Lisbon's University about the ECB's role in the stabilization of the Euro Area, namely for the Portuguese economy.

This Monday, the governor of the Bank of Portugal and member of the ECB governing council, Carlos Costa, spoke about the role of the European Central Bank in the Euro Area: “The ECB was critical and decisive in guaranteeing the stabilization of the economy of the monetary union”.

During the conference at Lisbon’s Law faculty, the governor of BdP also stated: “It [ECB] replaced financial markets by providing liquidity to the banking systems of the countries that depended on capital markets and which, from one moment to the other, lost access to capital markets.”

"QE [Quantitative Easing] was decisive for managing the crisis and for starting up the economy.”

Carlos Costa

The governor also took the time to speak about Portugal, saying that the country’s economy had the monetary policy as its “great stabilizer of disposable income”. He added: “As interest rates are indexed to Euribor rates, Portuguese families benefited during the crisis from a significant reduction of their monthly mortgage payments, which corresponded to a very significant supplement of disposable income.”