The last review of the ECB's monetary policy strategy in 2003 followed a period of predominantly upside risks to price stability. Experience following the 2008 financial crisis has focused renewed attention on the question of how monetary and fiscal policy should best interact, in particular in an environment of structurally low interest rates and persistent downside risks to price stability. This debate has been further intensified by the economic impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In the euro area, the unique architecture of a monetary union consisting of sovereign Member States, with cross-country heterogeneities and weaknesses in its overall construction, poses important challenges.12 Tax policy may also substitute interest rate policy to change real interest rates (the cost of current consumption in terms of future consumption), even in the case of balanced budgets. See Feldstein (2002) and Correia et al. (2013).
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A safe asset is of high credit quality, retains its value in difficult times, and is traded in liquid markets. We show that bonds issued by the European Union (EU) are widely considered to be of high credit quality, and that their yield spread over German Bunds remained contained during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic recession. Recent issuances and taps under the EU’s SURE and NGEU initiatives helped improve EU bonds’ market liquidity from previously low levels, while also reducing liquidity risk premia. Eurosystem purchases and holdings of EU bonds did not impair market liquidity. Currently, an obstacle to EU bonds achieving a genuine euro-denominated safe asset status, approaching that of Bunds, lies in the one-off, time-limited nature of the EU’s COVID-19-related policy responses.
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