have a sizeable impact on our balance sheet, which is expected to move towards the dimensions it used to have at the beginning of 2012, and the governing council stands ready to take further action if needed, in compliance with its mandate to maintain price stability. conclusion ladies and gentlemen, it is time for me to conclude. my bottom line is also my starting line. investment is rightly said to be today ’ s demand and tomorrow ’ s supply. yet investment in europe is falling short. if we don ’ t manage to get investment going again, we will weaken the economy in the short run and undermine its prospects in the long run. our efforts should therefore be focused on jump - starting investment. however, and this was really the crux of my argument, we will only manage to stimulate investment if structural, fiscal and monetary policies mutually reinforce each other. bis central bankers ’ speeches

deployed a number of non - standard tools. increasingly our focus here has shifted towards the financing of small and medium - sized bis central bankers ’ speeches enterprises, which heavily rely on bank financing and in many cases are struggling to retain access to credit. these companies may be small, but when they face a funding problem, it is a big problem for all of us, given that they employ around three - quarters of the euro area ’ s workforce. in june, we decided to launch a series of targeted longer - term refinancing operations – tltros – to ensure that banks have sufficient liquidity to lend to the real economy. the tltros have been designed to encourage banks to increase their lending to the nonfinancial corporate sector. in addition, we have also taken measures to underpin specific market segments that play a key role in the financing of the economy. last week, the governing council decided to start buying high - quality asset - backed securities and covered bonds in october. we will purchase both existing and newly issued abs, which are simple, transparent and real in the sense that the underlying assets consist of loans to the euro area non - financial private sector. let me respond to the concerns recently expressed about the risks posed to the integrity of our balance sheet. it is worth recalling that senior tranches of abs have proven to be highquality assets. according to the association of financial markets in europe, only 0. 12 % of european residential mortgage - backed securities ( rmbs ) outstanding in mid - 2007 have defaulted since then – compared with 22. 05 % for us rmbs. default rates for consumer finance abs and sme collateralised loan obligations have also remained low, well below 1 %, throughout the worst financial and economic crisis we have experienced. as regards covered bonds, credit quality is ensured by a double recourse ( on the underlying assets and on the issuer ), which is in fact comparable with the double protection that exists in our standard repo operations. overall, the decisions announced last week were taken with a view to underpinning the firm anchoring of medium to long - term inflation expectations, in line with our aim of maintaining inflation rates below, but close to, 2 %. we expect the two purchase programmes to effectively complement the tltros in enhancing the functioning of the monetary policy transmission and in providing further monetary accommodation given that we have now reached the lower bound. the newly decided measures, together with the tltros, will