ECB's purchase programmes

The following graph shows the outstanding amount of purchased assets in million € throughout time. To give a comparison, in 2021 Germany's GDP was 3,570,600 million €.

Data source: Soon after the ECB started the purchase programmes, we could not find any historic values of the purchases. We decided to collect this information ourselves by keeping records of the numbers published weekly on their website. The values pre-dating our initial record were re-constructed by going through ECB's weekly Financial Statements.

Active programmes

• currently none

Terminated programmes

• Pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) is intended to counter the serious risks to the monetary policy transmission mechanism and the outlook for the euro area posed by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Ihe purchases include private and public sector securities. It started in March 2020.
• Corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP) is intended to help further strengthen the pass-through of the Eurosystem’s asset purchases to financing conditions of the real economy, and, in conjunction with the other non-standard monetary policy measures in place, to provide further monetary policy accommodation by buying corporate sector bonds. It started on June 8, 2016.
• Asset-backed securities purchase programme (ABSPP) is intended to help banks to diversify funding sources and stimulates the issuance of new securities. Asset-backed securities can help banks to fulfil their main role: providing credit to the real economy. For instance, securitising loans and selling them can provide banks with the necessary funds to provide new lending to the real economy. This will further ease funding and credit conditions and help the transmission of monetary policy. The programme started on November 21, 2014.
• Public sector purchase programme (PSPP) is intended to help finance governments by buying nominal and inflation-linked central government bonds, and bonds issued by recognised agencies, regional and local governments, international organisations and multilateral development banks located in the euro area. It started on March 9, 2015 and is the biggest programme so far.
• Covered bond purchase programme (CBPP3) is intended to help enhance the functioning of the monetary policy transmission mechanism, supports financing conditions in the euro area, facilitates credit provision to the real economy and generates positive spillovers to other markets. It started on October 20, 2014
• Covered bond purchase programme (CBPP) was the Eurosystem first asset purchase programme. It started on July 2, 2009 and ended on June 30, 2010 when it reached the planned nominal amount of €60 billion. The Eurosystem intends to hold the assets bought under this programme until maturity.
• Covered bond purchase programme (CBPP2) was the Eurosystem second asset purchase programme. It started on November, 2011 and ended on October 31, 2012 when it reached the planned nominal amount of €16.4 billion. The Eurosystem intends to hold the assets bought under this programme until maturity.
• Securities Markets Programme (SMP) started on May 10, 2010 when the Eurosystem started purchasing securities to address the severe tensions in certain market segments which had been hampering the monetary policy transmission mechanism. On September 6, 2012 the programme was stopped. The securities will be held to maturity.

For further reading, see the ECB's website.

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