was a most challenging year for the ecb ’ s monetary policy. it started with a severe economic downturn worldwide, following the outbreak of the financial crisis in autumn 2008. in this environment of subdued inflationary pressures, we continued with our policy of lowering our key rates further. overall, within a period of only seven months ( between october 2008 and may 2009 ) we lowered our main refinancing rate by 325 basis points. this brought our main refinancing rate to 1 %. to ensure that households and firms in the euro area would benefit from these most favourable financing conditions, we also continued in 2009 with and even extended our enhanced credit support to euro area banks. we did this in response to dysfunctional money markets that had weakened the ability of monetary policy to influence the outlook for price stability by interest rate decisions alone. among those non - standard measures, as we use to call them, the most prominent one is the full allotment liquidity provision through our refinancing operations with euro area banks – against good collateral and at the main refinancing rate prevailing at the time for several maturities extending well beyond that of the weekly operations. in 2009 we also extended the maturity of our longer - term refinancing operations to up to one year. as rightly emphasised in your draft resolution on the ecb ’ s annual report, this “ enhanced credit support ” has been successful in avoiding additional dysfunctional financial tensions which would have led to a depression or an even deeper recession. let me emphasise that all our action was fully in line with our mandate to deliver price stability in the medium - term for the euro area as a whole. that we have been able to credibly deliver on our mandate is reflected in a favourable inflation outlook and well anchored inflation expectations in the euro area. following some improvements in financial market conditions in the course of 2009, renewed market tensions erupted in a number of segments of the euro area bond market. since the smooth functioning of the bond market is essential to the transmission of the ecb ’ s key interest rates, we decided to intervene in the euro area ’ s debt securities markets with the aim to help restoring a more normal transmission of monetary policy to the economy. to this end we introduced our securities markets programme. to ensure that the programme does not impact on our monetary policy stance, we re - absorb all the liquidity injected. to sum up, let me emphasise that all our non - standard measures we

target, what specific niches or products or product ranges to zero in on …. as a general approach, i do not think that any government which is providing public money to shore up any sector in the face of a crisis will agree to provide a financial lifeline without asking further questions regarding staff being laid off and so forth. it will seem too much like coming to the help of the fat cats while the small fry are being laid off. we have to provide support across the board in an equitable manner, for what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. * what you are saying is that government must make sure that it not only supports the fat cats but also shelters the vulnerable members of the population from the adverse effects of the crisis? there is one crucial dimension which we very often tend to forget when we discuss such issues of social support. in mauritius we have a very extensive welfare state, which we have preserved in the face of sustained attacks from the bretton woods institutions at different points in time when they have tried to get the public sector to back down on provision of universal healthcare or to restrict itself to primary health care only and to give up other parts of the health care system. they have also tried to get us to give up on our free education system, on universal old - age pension and all this because it was not in keeping with one essential tenet of the washington consensus : moins d ’ etat, mieux d ’ etat. we have maintained all these social support measures, which are lacking right now in the west. today we are a tremendous increase in poverty levels in the united the states and in those parts of europe where they do not have much welfare support. so whenever we address social support issues, bear in mind that we have a huge social transfer budget. we tend to take this for granted. there is now an extra effort to be done in terms of trying to help the families that may be affected by job losses. i do not think anybody can guarantee that there will be no job losses. i think that there is no way for us to expect realistically that there will be no job losses in mauritius when our target markets are breaking new records of joblessness with each new batch of data releases. we must resign ourselves to the prospect of job losses, especially in the tourism sector and in the epz sector where orders are getting few. i hope that job losses will be limited in both numbers and duration and that they will be very much