The size of the European Central Bank's dormant government bond purchase programme remained at €195 billion last week as no bonds matured, the bank said today.
The ECB terminated its Securities Markets Programme (SMP) in September to replace it with a new, but yet to be used, plan dubbed Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT).
But because the ECB has said it will keep the bonds it acquired under the SMP programme until they mature, it will take years until the programme ceases to exist.
The ECB revealed in February for the first time the contents of its SMP portfolio.
This showed that it had €99 billion of Italian bonds, €44 billion of Spanish, €31 billion of Greek, €22 billion of Portuguese and €14 billion of Irish government debt at the end of last year.
It will take an amount equivalent to the current SMP holdings as weekly deposits from banks tomorrow to counterbalance the buys and neutralise any threat of them fuelling inflation.
