Almost €3tn of emergency liquidity injected by the European Central Bank during the Covid-19 pandemic will have drained from the financial system by 2027, marking a milestone in the normalisation of monetary policy.
According to a forecast published by the central bank’s staff on Thursday, the excess liquidity that banks in the Eurozone deposit at the ECB will fall below €2tn next year, a level last seen before policymakers embarked on the unprecedented stimulus in early 2020.
“It marks the end of an era,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING. “The state of emergency in European monetary policy is coming to a close,” he added, saying that the ECB managed to engineer the exit from its quantitative easing smoothly.