Financial Plumbing: Europe and the Fed's Interdistrict Settlement Account

One of this blog's most recurrently popular posts is a 2012 ditty entitled the Idiot's Guide to the Federal Reserve Interdistrict Settlement Account. The Interdistrict Settlement Account, or ISA, is a highly esoteric "plumbing" mechanism that lies at the centre of the Federal Reserve System. After a century of being ignored, it suddenly became a popular topic for discussion in late 2011 and 2012 as the breakup of the euro became a real possibility. Groping for a fix, European analysts turned to the world's other large monetary union, the U.S. Federal Reserve System, to see how it coped with the sorts of monetary problems that Europe was then experiencing.

Here's a short explanation of the ISA. Consider that there is no such thing as a unified Federal Reserve dollar. Rather, both the paper dollars that you hold in your wallet and the electronic reserves that a private bank holds in its vaults are the liability of one of twelve distinct Federal Reserve district banks. Thanks to the convention among these Reserve banks of accepting each others dollars at par, a 1:1 exchange rate between each of these twelve U.S. dollar brands prevails. This gives rise to the useful mental short cut of assuming that there is one homogeneous dollar brand. But to do so ignores the heterogeneity at the core of the system —we can imagine worlds, for instance, in which one district's dollars, say those of the St Louis Fed, are considered to be so inferior to the rest that the other Reserve banks will only accept "St. Louis's bucks" at a discount.

All inter-district flows between Reserve banks must be settled, which is where the ISA comes into the picture. The ISA is a ledger that tracks the various imbalances that accrue between Federal Reserve banks. Each April that imbalance is settled by a transfer of assets from debtor to creditor Reserve banks, so that if St. Louis is owing and San Francisco is owed, then bonds will flow from the former to the latter, reducing each district's respective ISA balance (or increasing it) to a sufficient level.

I'm happy to say that my ISA post was useful to a number of researchers, including Karl Whelan (pdf), Kevin H. O’Rourke and Alan M. Taylor, and most recently, Alexander Wolman (pdf), who all made reference to it in recent papers. I like to think that this demonstrates the second purpose of the econblogosphere. The first purpose, of course, is to swarm over polished work by those like Piketty and Reinhart/Rogoff searching for chinks in the armour. The second is to act as an advance scout of sorts. When a completely new problem crops up, a blogger can quickly pump out a few posts, establishing a beachhead from which the main army—academics with time, money, and resource—can begin to launch a larger-scale attack.

While scouts can provide useful hints on where to launch initial sorties, they will always make a few errors, and I want to draw attention to one error I made in my ISA post. I speculated that the Federal Reserve banks may not have bothered to settle the ISA in 2011. Given a visual inspection of the various imbalances that had arisen between several of the Reserve banks, it appeared that the Richmond Fed in particular had been allowed to carryover a large deficit while the New York Fed (FRBNY) was stuck with an outstanding credit. Luckily for the small group of folks interested in the ISA, Federal Reserve researcher Alexander Wolman has recently provided some clarity on this issue.

Wolman has written the definite explanation of how the ISA functions and it is well worth your time if you want to discover how this fascinating mechanism works. (In defense of my old Idiot's Guide, note that I did manage to incorporate the destruction of the Death Star scene into it — I doubt Alex's editors would let him get away with that). He also goes through the data to show how the ISA settled in April 2011. I had originally focused on the New York Fed's ISA balance as the basis for my suspicion that settlement may not have occurred—the FRBNY's ISA balance had not fallen by the proper amount over the settlement month. But if you look at the FRBNY's securities balance on its balance sheet, you'll see that it rose by $100-$150 billion, an amount sufficient to settle the debts that other Reserve banks owed it. If you care to explore more deeply, Alex deals with this on page 135 of his article. I'm tickled pink that he managed to "settle" this bit of trivia since it has been a recurring topics on this blog. (See here and here).

I should point out that the 2011 episode interested me because if non-settlement had occurred, then the ISA would impose very weak constraints on payments imbalances arising between the various district Reserve Banks. European analysts, who were looking to the U.S. for inspiration, needed to know whether the ISA imposed stern limits on imbalances or lenient ones.

Like the Fed, the ECB is composed of a number of member banks, or national central banks (NCBs). Each issues their own brand of Euro while accepting all other Euros at par, thereby ensuring a smooth 1:1 exchange between the various Euros. Unlike the Fed, the ECB has no settlement mechanism. Imbalances that arise between member banks can continue growing perpetually. This is what appeared to be happening between 2008 and 2012 as European depositors, wary of a break up the Eurozone, fled the GIIPS banking systems for safe havens like German and Dutch banks, resulting in the emergence of massive deficits and credits between the various member NCBs. The chart below illustrates the size of these imbalances, which have since shrunk.

Source: Euro Crisis Monitor, Osnabrück University

A number of analysts, led by Hans Werner Sinn, felt that a U.S.-style ISA settlement mechanism should be grafted on to the European payments system. In theory, this would impose strict discipline on NCBs and prevent imbalances from emerging. Many, including myself, felt that this sort of discipline might be a bad idea.

But a better rebuttal of the proposed European ISA is that the Federal Reserve ISA was never the stern mechanism that folks like Sinn made it out to be. Though my point about 2011 non-settlement is false, other features of the ISA provide for long settlement delays, including the "rediscounting mechanism" that I mentioned in my Idiot's Guide. However, the best person to learn from on this topic is economic historian Barry Eichengreen who, in the video that I've linked to below, provides a definitive historical overview of the ISA.

While the whole video is worth watching, I'm going to draw attention to a chart that Eichengreen shows at around minute 14-15 which I reproduce below.

Source: Federal Reserve Bulletin, 1922

During 1920 and 1921, large and persistent imbalances between Federal Reserve banks emerged, much like the imbalances that have plagued the Eurosystem since the credit crisis. It would seem that the Fed, just a young pup at the time, faced the very same problem that the ECB began to face just nine years after its debut and, much like the ECB, it chose to handle it by allowing for non-settlement. Eichengreen (and Mehl, Chitu & Richardson) has an upcoming paper that explores the long history of Reserve bank "mutual assistance", although for now you'll have to be content with the video.

The European payment imbalances debate (or Target2 debate) has long since died out. Germany's ever-growing creditor position halted in 2012 and has been shrinking ever since while debtors like Italy, Spain, and Greece have seen their negative positions return towards zero. No one talks about intra-Eurosystem imbalances or Euro breakup anymore, at least not on the blogosphere. But I have no doubt that somewhere in the ECB's deepest catacombs a group of European monetary architects are debating if, how, and when to import an ISA-style settlement mechanism into Europe. Let's hope that they are very careful in their approach and consider the softest possible solution.

A rush for US paper dollars: the rejuvenation of the world's most popular brand

Here are Paul Krugman and James Hamilton on the renewed demand for dollar bills.

So what's behind the soaring demand for US paper dollars? A simple strategy for getting a grasp on US data is to compare it to the equivalent in Canada. Comparisons between Canada and the US serve as ideal natural experiments since both of us have similar customs and geographies. By controlling for a whole range of possible factors we can tease out the defining ones.

The chart below shows the demand for Canadian paper dollars and US paper dollars over time. To make visual comparison easier, I've normalized the two series so we start at 10 in 1984. On top of each series I've overlayed an exponential trendline based on the 1984-2006 period. I've zoomed in on 1997 for no other reason than to provide a higher resolution image of the typical shape of cash demand over a year.

Some interesting observations:

1. Not a huge surprise, but the demand for US paper has been accelerating far faster than the demand for Canadian paper. As James Hamilton points out, this is no doubt due to the huge transactional demand for US dollars overseas. The emerging countries in which US paper is demanded often have high growth rates, and their requirement for transaction media is correspondingly elevated. Unlike greenbacks, Canadian loonies are only demanded in Canada. As a slow-growth country, we don't require rapidly expanding amounts of physical transactions media.

2. Zooming in on any given year (I've chosen 1997) the demand for Canadian paper is far more jagged than the demand for US paper. Why is this? My guess is that the demand for US paper is diffused across multiple nations with diverging business practices and cultures. The demand for Canadian paper, on the other hand, is tightly linked to specific Canadian customs, holiday seasons, and payroll scheduling practices. The overseas demand that smooths out and counterbalance the peculiarities of domestic US paper demand don't exist for loonies.

3. There are some neat patterns in the chart. No, not all cash is demanded by criminals. There's always a cash spike at Christmas/New Years, and if you look carefully you can see jumps in Canadian cash demand coincide with major holidays, including Thanksgiving and the September long weekend. As Lenin once said, give me data on your nation's money supply and I can tell you when its holidays are. And note the huge Y2K-inspired rush to hold paper. Cash is still the ultimate medium for coping with raw uncertainty.

4. US paper demand started to slacken relative to trend in the early 2000s. One might be tempted to blame technological advances or changes in US preferences over payment media for slowing demand. Cash is a dinosaur, right? But this can't be the case. Canadians benefit from the same technologies as the US, nor do payment preferences change when one moves from 50 miles south of the 49th parallel to 50 kilometres north of it. If technology or preferences had changes, then Canadian cash demand would have deteriorated too, but as the chart shows, it continued to rise on trend. The best explanation for the US dollar's divergence from its long term growth just as Canada hewed to its trend is that foreign demand for US paper began to decline.

It's a reasonable explanation. Around 2002, the value of the US dollar begin a long and steady deterioration against most of the world's currencies, in particular the euro. It's very probable that consumers of the US$ brand punished the brand owner, the Federal Reserve, by returning dollars enmasse to their source, thus reducing the supply of paper dollars (or at least reducing its rate of increase). As incontrovertible proof, I submit exhibit A—a 2007 video of Jay-Z flashing euros instead of dollars (skip to 0:51).

5. So it seems to me that from 2003-2008 there was a mini run on the Fed by overseas cash holders. What Jaz-Z doesn't show is the process by which US dollars would have refluxed back to the US. Euroization, or de-dollarization, goes like this. A foreigner goes to their local bank to trade US dollars for euros. The local bank, flush with dollars, puts this paper on a plane for redeposit at their US correspondent bank in New York. The New York bank, which now has too much vault cash, loads these dollars into a Brinks truck and sends them to the New York Fed. And the FRBNY shreds the notes up.

This mini run would have put downward pressure on the federal funds rate. Here's how. Having accumulated excess cash from overseas, US banks would have sent this cash to the Fed in return for reserves. But now these banks have excess reserves. Desperate to get rid of them, they all try to lend their reserves at once, driving the federal funds rate down. To ensure that the federal funds rate doesn't fall below target, the Fed would has to sell treasuries in order to suck in reserves, thereby reducing the oversupply in the federal funds market and keeping the fed funds fixed.

The lesson being, when folks like Jambo in Zimbabwe and Julio in Panama get distraught about the quality of their Ben Franklins, the effects of their unhappiness will be felt, with some delay, all the way back at the Fed's open market desk.

6. US paper demand has since rebounded. Paul Krugman posts a chart that shows a massive accumulation of US cash holdings relative to GDP beginning in 2008. But Krugman's chart overstates the effect by constricting his time frame. As my chart shows, the rate of growth in US paper has only returned to the trend it demonstrated in previous decades.

Krugman attributes this increase in dollar holdings to the fact that the US is in a liquidity trap. When rates are near zero, people have no problems holding zero-yielding cash. I'm not so sure about his explanation. Canada had incredibly low rates for a few years, yet as our chart shows, Canadian paper never budged from its trendline growth. The same goes for the Euro. Rates have been low there, but we haven't seen a flight into paper money. Because cash is inconvenient and bulky, rates have to go pretty far below zero before people flee to paper.

No, the more likely explanation for the rebound in the US paper outstanding is the rejuvenation of the US dollar brand. The ECB has had to deal with waves of negative publicity for the last few years. Given the alternatives, the world wants to hold Benjamins again. This seems to be borne out in the chart below, which shows the ratio of ECB-to-Fed banknotes in circulation.



The US dollar, it would seem, is back. Cash holdings are only one sign off a currency's hegemony. It would be telling if there's also been a rebound in the use of the dollar to denominate bonds and other debt instruments, as well as increased holdings of US dollar-denominated assets in the reserves of major central banks. The US's "exorbitant privilege", as Barry Eichengreen calls it, continues apace.

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Note: As I was writing this, I stumbled on a paper by Ruth Judson via James Hamilton called Crisis and Calm: Demand for U.S. Currency at Home and Abroad from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011. And what do you know. She uses Canada as a foil for determining US cash demand, just like I did. I haven't read it yet, but am quite looking forward to doing so and am willing to yack about it in the comments.

On Lenin, read White & Schuler.

Financial deepening and currency internationalization, the bitcoin edition

Much of the conversation about bitcoin adoption focuses on its use in goods and services transactions. Breaking bitcoin news, for instance, draws attention to the fact that the Internet Archive will be giving employees the option to be paid in bitcoin. This focus on brick & mortar transactions means that the role that bitcoin financial instruments—stocks, bonds, and derivatives—have to play in promoting bitcoin adoption often gets overshadowed.

I'm currently reading Barry Eichengreen's Exorbitant Privilege which goes into the mechanics of what it takes to create a truly international currency. Eichengreen points out that prior to World War I the dollar played a negligible role relative to the pound sterling in world markets, but by the mid 1920s it was the dominant unit for invoicing payments and denominating bonds. Eichengreen's theory is that the US dollar became the world's go-to currency because of the emergence of a very specific financial instrument—the banker's acceptance.

An acceptance is much like a bill of exchange, a financial instrument I explained in my last post. Say a merchant decides to pay for a shipment of goods with a personal IOU, or bill. If a bank first "accepts" the bill i.e. if it agrees to vouch for the IOU, then this gives the bill more credibility. It is now a banker's acceptance.

According to Eichengreen, around 1908 or 1909, a concerted effort to foster the growth of the US acceptance market began. Up till then, US banks had been prohibited from dealing in acceptances and branching abroad—both these limitations would be removed by new legislation. To promote liquidity and backstop the acceptance market, the Federal Reserve, established in 1914, was given authority to buy and sell acceptances via open market operations. Furthermore, these acceptances could legally "back", or collateralize, the Fed's note issue. This feature was particularly helpful. Although the Fed was also legally permitted to purchase government securities, government securities could not "back" the note issue. Acceptances, therefore, became the more flexible and preferred asset for Fed open market operations, at least until 1932 when the limitations on government collateral were removed. According to Eichengreen, the Fed was the largest investor in the acceptance market and sometimes held the majority of outstanding issues on its balance sheet.

By the mid-1920s foreign acceptances denominated in dollars exceeded those denominated in sterling by a factor of 2:1 and more central banks held US forex reserves than sterling. London was on the way out, and New York on the way in. By 1929, the amount of outstanding foreign public bonds denominated in dollars (excluding the Commonwealth) exceeded sterling bonds. The lesson here is that a key step in the sequence of internationalizing a currency is getting it to be used in financial markets. This involves the development of deep, liquid, and accessible markets in securities denominated in that currency.

What sort of financial deepening do we see in the bitcoin universe, and how might we compare it to the dollar's emergence in the 1910s and 20s?

There are a number of healthy signs of financial deepening. I count five competing bitcoin securities exchanges that provide a forum for trading bitcoin-denominated stocks and bonds. These include Cryptostocks, BTCT, MPEx, Havelock, and Picostocks. A sixth, LTC-Global, provides a market in litecoin securities, a competing altchain. Holders of bitcoin needn't cash out of the bitcoin universe in order to get a better return. Instead, they can buy a bond or a stock listed on any of these exchanges.

The largest publicly-traded company in the bitcoin universe is SatoshiDice, a bitcoin gambling website listed on MPEx. With 100 million shares outstanding and a price of 0.006 BTC, SatoshiDice's market cap is ~600,000 BTC which comes out to around $17 million. SatoshiDice IPOed last year at 0.0032 BTC. With bitcoin only trading at $12 back then (it is now worth $29), the entire company would have been worth $4 million. Given today's $17 million valuation, SatoshiDice shareholders have seen a nice return over a short amount of time—much of it provided by bitcoin appreciation.

While SatoshiDice certainly provides some depth to bitcoin financial markets it has the potential to shallow them out too. Because MPEx charges large fees to trade on its exchange, a few of the competing exchanges have created what are called SatoshiDice "passthroughs". Much like an ETF, a passthrough holds an underlying asset—in this case SatoshiDice shares on MPEx—and flows through all dividends earned to passthrough owners. As a result, investors can get exposure to SatoshiDice without having to pay MPEx's expensive fees. BTCT, for instance, lists two different SatoshiDice passthroughs (GSDPT and S.DICE-PT) which together account for more trading volume than all other stocks and bonds listed on BTCT.

SatoshiDice's sheer size is to some extent problematic since Bitcoin financial markets are not as deep as they might appear. Should something ever happen to SatoshiDice, a big part of the bitcoin financial universe's liquidity will be wiped out, and this would ripple out across the entire field of bitcoin securities. The same might have happened to banker's acceptances in their day, except for one difference—the Fed was willing to back the acceptance market up. In the bitcoin universe, there's no buyer of of last resort to provide liquidity support to SatoshiDice shareholders.

Another impediment to deeper bitcoin markets is the hazy legality of the bitcoin securities exchanges. The first major bitcoin securities exchange, GLBSE, was closed in October 2012 with no prior warning. According to this article, potential regulatory and tax liabilities convinced GLBSE's founder to shut it down on his own behest. If any of the existing bitcoin exchanges were to grow too noticeable, one could imagine the SEC (or its equivalent) knocking on their door and forcing the exchange-owner to pull the plug. This sort of regulatory uncertainty can only dampen the liquidity and depth of bitcoin financial markets.

US authorities, on the other hand, didn't need to heed the rules when they built the banker's acceptance market. They created the rules. If financial deepening in the Bitcoin universe is to proceed it will happen despite regulations and not because of them.

The last headwind to bitcoin financial deepening is bitcoin's volatility. Eichengreen writes that the seesawing of the pound sterling during the war period encouraged financial markets to search for a more stable unit in which to express debts. The pound had always been anchored to gold (or silver), but it was unpegged from its century's long gold tether when the war broke out. Although it was repegged in January 1916, this time to the dollar, this did not secure confidence in the sterling's value since the peg was dependent on American support. When this support was withdrawn at war's end, sterling fell by a third within a year. Through all of this, the dollar continued to be defined in terms of gold, a feature which no doubt attracted issuers.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has more than doubled in just two months. Back in June 2011, it fell by 50% in just two days. Like pound sterling during the war, bitcoin's lack of stability will do little to promote deeper financial markets.

Although I've stressed the difficulties that bitcoin markets face in developing more depth, the sheer amount of financial innovation I'm seeing from those involved in the various bitcoin securities exchanges is impressive. I wish them the best. The more they build up bitcoin securities markets, the better an alternative bitcoin presents to competing currency units.


Disclaimer: I am long SatoshiDice and several bitcoin mining stocks.

ECB, IMF, ICU and other exciting monetary acronyms

Gavyn Davies drew some interesting parallels between the ECB and the IMF last week. This follows on his post the "ultimate taboo", in which he analyzed the idea of "convertibility risk", a term first used by ECB head Mario Draghi in a speech in late July.

Gavyn points out that in explicitly drawing attention to its job of controlling convertibility risk - ie. ensuring that all euros are the same - the modern ECB is becoming more like the IMF. Specifically, during Bretton Woods the IMF sometimes financed the balance of payments deficits of member nations in order to ensure the system of fixed exchange rates stayed, well, fixed. When it did so, the IMF was engaging in a mind game of sorts with the market, for the market knew that the IMF knew that the market knew that rates could be modified if attacked with enough force. In admitting to the world the existence of convertibility risk, the ECB is now displaying an IMF-degree of hyper self-awareness... for the first time.

In order to ensure that this financing was not permanent, the IMF would impose limits on the borrowing nation's finances. This is what the ECB is now doing, too, as Gavyn points out. For instance, in order to be able to participate in the ECB's new outright monetary transactions (OMT) program, nations will be expected to conform to basic ECB requirements or risk being dropped. This is the idea of "conditionality".

In the comments I brought up a comparison to the institution that the IMF could have been if Keynes had won his debate against Harry Dexter White: the International Clearing Union (ICU). I only point this out because having as many comparisons as possible might help shed clarity on the Target2 imbalance problem. It also just so happens that I am reading Barry Eichengreen's book Exorbitant Privilege which touches on this bit of monetary history.

The ICU was first put forward by Keynes in 1941. Much like the ECB clears all intra-European payments on its own books via Target2, the ICU was to have cleared all international payments on its own books. Where the ECB uses the euro, the ICU would have used the bancor. Keynes's purpose for establishing the clearing union was to ensure that each country would be "allowed a certain margin of resources and a certain interval of time within which to effect a balance in its economic relations with the rest of the world" (Proposals for an International Currency (or clearing) Union, February 11, 1942). This would allow the war-ravaged world to return to an era of unfettered free trade rather than isolationism, especially the sort that prevailed in the inter-war years in which narrow bilateral clearing agreements were the norm.

What is interesting is that unlike Target2's open ended granting of credit, Keynes envisioned that the ICU would set explicit limits on any country's deficits. Here is (presumably) Keynes:

Measures would be necessary to prevent the piling up of credit and debit balances without limit, and the system would have failed in the long run if it did not possess sufficient capacity for self-equilibrium to prevent this. (Proposals   for an International Currency (or clearing) Union, February 11, 1942)

It really is too bad that the architects of the Euro never bothered to read that gem. Here, for instance, are the specific fine-print defining the maximum ICU debit:

The amount of the maximum debit balance allowed to any member-State shall be determined by reference to the amount of its foreign trade, and shall be designated its quota... The initial quotas might be fixed by reference to the sum of each country's exports and imports on the average of (say) the three pre-war years, being either equal or in a determined lesser proportion to this amount, a special assessment being substituted in cases where this formula would be, for any reason, inappropriate. Subsequently, after the elapse of the transitional period, the quotas might be revised annually in accordance with the actual volume of trade in the three preceding years.

 A charge of 1 per cent. per annum will be payable to the Reserve Fund of the Clearing Union on the average balance of a member-State, whether credit or debit, in excess of a quarter of its quota; and a further charge of 1 per cent. on the average balance, whether credit or debit, in excess of half its quota. (ibid)

The keen reader will notice that in the above quote Keynes advocated levying penalties and limits not only on debtors to the system but also on creditors. These penalties were sure to be "valuable inducements towards keeping a level balance", as Keynes put it. Eichengreen draws attention to a more self-serving motive for Keynes's plan. Envisioning large US surpluses after the war (and large UK deficits), Keynes wanted to devise a way that would soften the effects of these imbalances on the UK by giving the nation time to rebalance, while at the same time penalizing the US for its large credit position. It was not to be, of course, as the ICU never came into being, displaced by the IMF and (to a degree) the Marshall Plan.

In addition to imposing a 1% charge per annum on surpluses above one-half of their quota, listed below are Keynes's specific proposals on credit limits:

A member-State whose credit balance has exceeded a half of its quota on the average of at least a year shall discuss with the Governing Board (but shall retain the ultimate decision in its own hands) what measures would be appropriate to restore the equilibrium of its international balances, including—

(a) measures for the expansion of domestic credit and domestic demand;

(b) the appreciation of its local currency in terms of bancor, or, alternatively, an increase in money-wages;

(c) the reduction of excessive tariffs and other discouragements against imports;

(d) international loans for the development of backward countries. 

I doubt modern Germany would accept a 1% penalty on its massive Target2 balance, or that it would let itself be shoehorned into increasing wages or expanding domestic credit so as to help its neighbors solve their Target2 imbalance problem.

As for debtor countries, Keynes envisioned that countries would not be able to increase their debit balances by more than one quarter of their quota without the permission of the ICU Governing Board. In the case of debit balances in excess of one-half of its quota, the Governing Board could force the country to reduce the value of its currency or impose controls on capital outflows. When debit balances exceeded three-quarters of the quota, the Board could put the debtor nation under a form of financial shunning in which

it may be asked by the Governing Board to take measures to improve its position and, in the event of its failing to reduce its debit balance below the figure in question within two years, the Governing Board may declare that it is in default and no longer entitled to draw against its account except with the permission of the Governing Board. Each member-State, on joining the system, shall agree to pay to the Clearing Union any payments due from it to a country in default towards the discharge of the latter's debit balance and to accept this arrangement in the event of falling into default itself. 

Anyhow, the point of all this is to show how the ECB is bereft of any form of control over its clearing members in comparison to what the ICU Governing Board would have exercised over its own members had it been established as per Keynes's plan. This may be one of the problems in forming a currency union. In order to motivate the political will necessary for the creation of any sort of international clearing union, prospective members can only be enticed to join by proposing systems with weak central control over member nation finances. But in order for a currency union to work, strong and systematic rules must be set in place prior to the system's debut. Thus the more robust ICUs of the world are destined to never get off the ground, whereas shaky propositions that should never get off the ground (like the ECB) do get off the ground.