The asset purchase program of the Euro area, active between 2015 and 2018, constitutes an interesting special case of Quantitative Easing (QE) because the ECB's (Public Sector Purchase Program) PSPP program involved the purchase of the bonds of peripheral Euro area governments, which were...

This paper briefly assesses the effectiveness of the different non-standard monetary policy tools in the Euro Area. Its main focus is on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) Programme which is praised by some as the ECB's 'magic wand'. Moreover, it discloses further possible unintended...

Helicopter money has once been proposed as a theoretical thought experiment by Milton Friedman in order to elucidate the effect of money injections into the macroeconomy over time. However, some Euro area member states nowadays consider helicopter money, i.e. permanent Quantitative Easing (QE),...