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ECB - European Central Bank
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Latest releases on the ECB website - Press releases, speeches and interviews, press conferences.
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Who owns crypto in the euro area? Drivers of crypto adoption, payment use, and its interaction with fiat cash
Using a survey of 39,507 adults in 17 euro-area countries, I find that crypto-asset owners and the niche subgroup of payers have distinct profiles. Owners – typically younger, male, and financially active – exhibit mixed preferences, valuing both cash-like privacy and card-like speed. Crypto payers display a cash-centric profile, seeking to replicate physical cash’s privacy and ease of use in digital form. While standard specifications show that holding cash reserves is positively associated with owning crypto – challenging the view that early adopters reject cash –, a multiple-instrument IV strategy exploiting pandemic-related payment shocks reveals a causal sign reversal: for compliers, building precautionary cash buffers reduces the probability of crypto ownership under uncertainty. These findings (1) explain the ownership-payment wedge as driven by user profiles beyond merchant-acceptance frictions, (2) show crypto and cash act as portfolio complements but substitutes under stress, and (3) may inform crypto regulation and CBDC design.
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Earnings manipulation and probability of default: insights from AnaCredit and supervisory
This article provides a novel insight into whether earnings manipulation signals are reflected in banks’ internal credit risk estimates, as measured by the probability of default (PD) estimates, and whether such manipulation has an impact on credit risk (point in time or deferred). The hypothesis is that firms engaging in manipulation may be exposed to increased credit risk over time, which should be reflected in higher PD values. Using AnaCredit – a granular dataset covering credit exposures from European banks between 2019 and 2022 – and financial statement data from Orbis, we constructed a sample of 4,649 publicly traded corporations, for which we computed the Beneish M-Scores that are used to detect potential earnings manipulation. This allowed us to determine the interrelation with PDs. Our results reveal a weak and negative correlation between M-Scores and PDs, suggesting that earnings manipulation signals are not fully absorbed by banks’ internal models. Further analysis shows that these results are driven by the high prevalence of firms with no earnings manipulation signals. Firms for which the M-Score effectively indicates potential earnings manipulation (8.9% of the sample) are observed to have higher PDs, which also increase further as the M-Score worsens. These findings support the hypothesis that earnings manipulation signals are not fully reflected in credit risk estimates over time, indicating that their impact – when it occurs – is deferred instead of being captured immediately in internal models. Our results indicate that the relationship between potential earnings manipulation and banks’ internal credit risk estimates is highly context-dependent and non-linear. Cross-sectional analyses by country and industry show consistent patterns linking default risk to M-Scores in selected countries and sectors. [...]
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Central clearing and the pricing of specialness in repo markets
Repo markets clear either bilaterally over the counter (OTC) or through central counterparties (CCPs), which differ in how counterparty risk is priced. In bilateral markets, repo rates reflect borrower-specific risk, while CCP clearing pools counterparties and applies a common pricing rule. We develop a model of security-driven repo in which repo rates are non-linear in borrower risk. As a result, averaging borrower-specific OTC prices yields more negative rates than pricing the pooled borrower in CCP markets. The model predicts that the CCP–OTC specialness gap compresses during periods of counterparty uncertainty and varies with borrower and collateral characteristics. Using transaction-level data from the euro-area interbank repo market around the March 2020 COVID-19 shock, we find evidence consistent with these predictions. Our results show that central clearing dampens specialness in normal times but stabilizes repo pricing during stress.
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Economic Bulletin Issue 2, 2026
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Liquidity conditions and monetary policy operations from 5 November 2025 to 10 February 2026
This box describes the Eurosystem liquidity conditions and monetary policy operations in the seventh and eighth reserve maintenance periods of 2025, from 5Â November 2025 to 10Â February 2026.
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Financial and macroeconomic implications of the rise in very long-term yields
The rise in very long-term yields over the past year has steepened the slopes between 30-year and ten-year yields in several advanced economies, including the euro area as a whole. This box explores the implications of this steepening for financial markets and intermediaries and also considers the broader macroeconomic outcomes. While higher very long-term yields are expected to have only a limited effect on government funding costs, the yield curve steepening is translating into higher rates on mortgages with long fixation periods. However, financial conditions indices that summarise asset prices with macroeconomic relevance remain essentially unaffected by the inclusion of very long-term maturities. In addition, empirical estimates suggest that the steepening of the long-end yield curve is having only a modest effect on euro area inflation and real GDP, with the impact being significantly smaller than that of changes in short-term rates. Overall, the findings indicate that while the steepening is affecting funding costs and financial intermediaries, its implications for broader financial conditions and macroeconomic dynamics remain contained.
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Non-linearities in oil prices: which conditions matter?
Over recent years we have observed that different oil market states can significantly influence how oil prices respond to shocks. Using a non-linear local projections framework, we find that oil prices react more strongly to oil supply shocks when key state variables – namely, investment fund positions, supply-demand imbalances and oil inventories – are at extreme levels, regardless of the sign of the shock. Further distinguishing between the sign of the shock and whether a state variable is unusually high or low provides additional insights. Upside risks to oil prices are most critical when oil supply is tight relative to demand, and investors hold very long positions at the time of an oil price surge. Conversely, downside risks are most pronounced when oil prices start to decrease in an environment of ample supply, and investors hold very short positions, leading to particularly large declines in oil prices.
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Unlocking trade potential: the benefits of improving cross-border payments
Cross-border payments are often slow and costly and, in some cases, may not be available. In line with the G20 Roadmap, several countries and regions, including the euro area, are working to interlink their domestic fast payment systems to improve speed, cost and transparency. Econometric evidence suggests that countries with interlinked systems trade about 4% more with each other – around half of the effect of a trade agreement and a quarter of the effect of a common currency. The gains of interlinking fast payment systems are larger in regions with high cross-border payment costs and for systems that allow the settlement of wholesale transactions.
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Boosting efficiency in public investment in times of fiscal constraint
The EU is faced with massive strategic public investment needs in an environment of limited fiscal space. Raising the spending efficiency of public investment, especially in countries with limited fiscal space, can ease the funding of the strategic investment needs while safeguarding debt sustainability. The article analyses the efficiency in public investment spending on transport infrastructure, which is the largest component of public investment across the EU, and finds substantial room for improvement.
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The third-country effects of trade wars
We study how trade wars propagate to countries that are not directly targeted. We develop a three-country New Keynesian model with trade in final and intermediate goods, incomplete asset markets, and asymmetric monetary regimes, and quantify the spillovers of the 2025 U.S.-China tariff escalation to the euro area. A bilateral U.S.-China trade war generates large and asymmetric welfare losses for the U.S. and China, while the euro area benefits temporarily from trade diversion. Once tariffs extend to euro-area goods, third-country welfare flips into losses and the Chinese downturn deepens. Welfare-maximizing retaliatory tariffs by the euro area deliver only modest domestic improvements, at the cost of large additional losses for the U.S. and China. Overall, the global incidence of trade policy is intrinsically multilateral: third-country gains under bilateral protectionism are short-lived, reverse once protection broadens, and cannot be inferred from two-country analysis.
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Adopting and investing in AI: evidence from euro area firms in the SAFE
This box presents new information about the adoption of, and investment in, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies by euro area firms, based on the Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE). The findings reveal that large firms, listed or venture capital-backed companies and young firms are adopting AI more frequently. Firms using AI are more likely to expect an increase in turnover and investment in fixed assets compared with firms not using AI. Similarly, they plan to allocate larger shares of their investment to AI compared with non-users, indicating a reinforcing cycle of adoption and innovation. Ownership structure influences investment patterns, with listed or venture capital-backed companies leading early-stage adoption and privately owned firms dominating at more advanced stages.
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Assessing the impact of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility on institutional quality: a Bayesian synthetic control approach
The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), launched in 2021, aims to promote long-term economic growth in EU Member States by incentivising structural reforms and investments. This paper explores a related supply-side transmission mechanism: improvements in institutional quality, as measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Using a Bayesian synthetic control model and data up to 2024, we find robust and economically meaningful RRF-induced improvements in institutional quality in Italy. For other main RRF beneficiary countries, the evidence of such an effect ranges from suggestive to limited. We show that this cross-country variation is broadly consistent with the implementation of the national Recovery and Resilience Plans in terms of implementation speed and reform mix. While it is too early to draw firm policy conclusions, the findings lend support to the view that conditional, reform-linked financing instruments of the RRF type can improve institutional quality and, thereby, long-term growth prospects – provided that the reforms are well designed and effectively implemented.
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Global implications of export controls on rare earths: a model-based assessment
In April and in October 2025 China imposed export controls on rare earths amid escalating trade tensions with the United States. Although these measures were too short-lived to generate macroeconomic effects, they signalled China’s ability to draw on its dominant position in the rare earth supply chain. This paper provides a structured assessment of the potential macroeconomic consequences associated with rare earth supply disruptions. First, it documents that exposure to rare earth supply disruptions is concentrated in high-tech and security-sensitive sectors including automotive, electronics and defence-related industries. Second, drawing on earlier episodes of Chinese export restrictions on critical minerals (notably in 2010 and 2023), it highlights two key mitigating forces from the targeted countries’ perspective: practical and strategic constraints on China’s ability to implement strict export bans, and innovation-led substitution by targeted countries. Third, the paper quantifies the global macroeconomic implications of a hypothetical scenario of stringent but partial Chinese export restrictions on rare earths lasting for 18 months. To do so, the analysis combines, for the various segments of the transmission chain, a partial equilibrium setup, a closed-economy DSGE model, and the multi-country multi-sector dynamic model of Aguilar et al. (2026). The main results, across specifications, suggest estimated output losses for the United States ranging between 0.3% and 0.6%, with the largest impacts concentrated in automotive and electronics manufacturing. The results at the same time highlight the sensitivity of model-based estimates to assumptions on the substitutability of rare earths and the severity of restrictions.
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The Eurosystem’s comprehensive payments strategy
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From bricks to clicks: an assessment of euro area digital investment
This box provides a first assessment of digital investment trends in the euro area by using proxies derived from annual national accounts and monthly production data. As there is no standardised measurement framework, our definition of digital investment covers investment in buildings and structures in the information and communication sector, investment in ICT equipment and computer software and databases in the business economy, and investment in research and development in the information and communication sector. The proxy shows that there has been a gradual increase in digital investment, likely driven most recently by the surge in global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and cloud services. Looking ahead, the share of digital investment in overall business investment is expected to continue growing, supported, among other factors, by venture capital, Next Generation EU funding and the EU AI Continent Action Plan. However, survey results point to concerns that insufficient energy supply and overregulation could hamper further growth.
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