to phase out gradually some of the extraordinary liquidity provision measures and scale back the number, frequency and maturity of longer - term refinancing operations. we conducted the last 12 - month operation in december 2009 and the last 6 - month operation in march 2010. in early march, the governing council decided to return to variable rate tender procedures for the regular three - month longer - term refinancing operations, starting with the operation to be conducted on 28 april 2010. at the same time, we will continue to provide adequate liquidity to the euro area banking system by conducting the main refinancing operations as fixed rate tender procedures with full allotment for as long as needed and, at least, until october this year, so as to facilitate the provision of credit to the euro area economy and further support its recovery. needless to say, if upside risks to price stability were to emerge, the governing council would take timely and appropriate action. fiscal policies in the euro area let me now to turn to fiscal policies. budgetary positions in the euro area deteriorated significantly in 2009 as a result of the economic contraction, fiscal policy stimulus and government support measures for the financial sector. eurostat ’ s latest estimates show that the average general government deficit ratio in the euro area increased from 2. 0 % of gdp in 2008 to 6. 3 % in 2009. out of the 16 euro area countries, 13 are already subject to an excessive deficit procedure. this year, all euro area countries are projected to record deficits above 3 % of gdp. according to the updated stability and growth programmes, a discernible improvement in fiscal positions is not foreseen in most countries until 2011 and 2012. the magnitude of the worsening of public finances is underscored by the official estimate that the average debt - to - gdp ratio is expected to reach 87 % in 2012, compared with 66 % in 2007 – that is 21 percentage points higher than five years earlier. thus, fiscal imbalances are sizeable, broad - based and likely to persist for some time to come. the deterioration in the fiscal position has been especially acute in a number of euro area countries, with ireland, greece and spain having recorded double - digit deficit ratios in 2009. the large revisions to greece ’ s budget deficit for 2009 revealed a very serious fiscal imbalance and triggered adverse financial market reactions. following the announcement of additional fiscal consolidation measures by the greek authorities in march 2010, the ecb welcomed these measures as convincing

tend to use contemporaneous market prices and do not consider the system as a whole. the ecb has developed a composite indicator of systemic stress ( ciss ) 4 that comprises five aggregate market segments accounted for by a range of variables and time - varying rank correlations between them. more recently, the ciss indicator has been used by hartmann et al. ( 2015 ), jointly with credit to the private sector and cycle variables ( industrial production, inflation and a council regulation ( eu ) no 1024 / 2013 of 15 october 2013 conferring specific tasks on the european central bank concerning policies relating to the prudential supervision of credit institutions. see ecb ( 2009 ), financial stability review, special feature b for a discussion on the concept of systemic risk. for an overview, see bisias, d., m. flood, a. w. lo and s. valavanis ( 2012 ), “ a survey of systemic risk analytics ”, office of financial research working paper no. 0001, january. hollo, d., m. kremer and m. lo duca ( 2012 ) “ a composite indicator of systemic stress in the financial system ”, ecb working paper no. 1426, march. bis central bankers ’ speeches short - term interest rate ) in a ms - var, to illustrate the dynamic interaction of systemic financial instability and the macroeconomy in the euro area. 5 catfin, a var and expected shortfall measure at system - wide level calculated with non - normal distributions with fat tails, showing the predictive capacity of financial volatility regarding real economic downturns was proposed by allen et al. 6 similarly, giglio et al. examine 19 measures of systemic risk for the us and 10 measures for the uk and the eu from the perspective of how well they forecast macroeconomic downturns. 7 they also build dimension - reduced risk indexes using principal components and partial quantile regression to demonstrate the robust performance of some indexes in anticipating future macroeconomic downturns. these efforts in developing composite indexes are complementary to the on - going research on the concept of a financial cycle as a sort of a generalisation of the old concept of credit cycle, distinct from the concept of the economic or business cycle. the ecb paper presented this morning by hiebert et al. 8 builds and extends on work done at the bis. 9 it shows how credit and asset prices share cyclical similarities,