Chart of the Day: The ECB Balance Sheet

Who says the ECB can’t keep up with the Fed. As the euro crisis has caused liquidity for euro zone banks to dry up, the ECB has taken on the intermediation role. In essence, they have taken on the dollar liquidity function that the US money markets used to provide via its bank liquidity operations and currency swaps with the Fed.

Gavyn Davies has the chart:

My take on LTRO, the latest liquidity operation? It:

The ECB of 2011 is to the Fed of 2008.

Source: ECB balance sheet sucked further into the crisis – Gavyn Davies, FT

4 Comments
  1. Skrisiloff says

    Where did you get this data? Seems like it used to be front and center on the ECB website, now buried under a lot of other statistics…

    1. John Creighton says

      This also seems relevant.

      https://www.ecb.int/stats/monetary/res/html/index.en.html

      The discount type window borrowing in the ECB is called the Marginal lending facility
      and deposits at the ECB are called the Deposit facility

      Look at the zip file showing
      Data on daily liquidity conditions (*) it seems to have these numbers and some other data.

  2. Mark Wadsworth says

    Yes, but what’s the other side of the balance sheet. The ECB have made loans to banks for three years for a couple of hundred billion Euros, fine. 

    But what’s on the liability side? Have they borrowed money? It seems not. If they’d literally printed notes, then we know that the notes show up as a liability.

  3. John Creighton says

    You could estimate changes via open market operations from here:
    https://www.ecb.int/mopo/implement/omo/html/top_history.en.html

    When the loan expires the balance sheet would shrink but new loans would expand the balance sheet. However, this will not account for discount window type borrowing (not sure what it is called in Europe). I wonder how various measure of the money supply would correlate with central bank assets.

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