Yesterday and the previous day, the Governing Council of the European Central Bank held its regular meeting in Malta, the first time ever this has happened.

It is a tradition with ECB that its Governing Council holds two meetings a year outside Frankfurt where it has its HQ.

In a Eurozone that is still very much a work in progress, the ECB has grown in importance over the past years with the birth and infancy of the euro first and then with the great crisis in the years following 2008.

It is not an easy process: the US, for instance, has had 200 years to get to a stage where the Federal Reserve operates as it does today.

In Europe, the ECB is hampered by the fact that the states of Europe have remained sovereign states rather than become one continental state as in the US. With regards to managing the euro, its Governing Council includes the governors of the central banks of the 19 eurozone member states.

Nevertheless, in an EU that was beset by doubts about its own existence, it was Mario Draghi, the ECB president, who some months ago came out with the statement the bank is ready to do all in its power to protect the euro that finally dispelled the clouds on the horizon. The euro today is still a world currency mainly because of this phrase.

Following that phrase, the ECB has undertaken many other steps to help the euro and the eurogroup emerge from the throes of the crisis. It has lowered down interest rates to historic lows and these past months, it has launched a policy of Quantity Easing (QE), that is, each month it is using €60 billion to buy assets and thus help the member nations’ economies.

Now at the meeting that ended yesterday, coinciding with the first great storm of autumn, the ECB’s Governing Council decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged and to continue with its programme of €1 trillion bond-buying at least until September 2016 and maybe beyond that.

The problem is that this QE programme does not seem to have worked. It has not boosted growth in the member states; unemployment is still high and what growth there has been has been rather anaemic.

Some have been urging it to push more money, in other words, increase QE; others to further lower the rates (although it is difficult to see how they can get any lower).

Mr Draghi, as we report in this issue, has set the ECB experts to work at identifying other tools that may work. In the meantime, what the ECB will do is to continue monitoring incoming information. Within the euro area demand remains resilient but there are concerns over growth prospects in emerging markets, the low price of oil which is set to remain low, and, above all, very low inflation, almost reaching the levels of deflation.

In these circumstances, the Governing Council yesterday decided to continue with asset purchases maybe even beyond September 2016 until there is a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation achieving inflation rates below but close to 2% over the medium term.

A cross-check of the outcome of the economic analysis with the signals coming from the monetary analysis indicates the need to firmly implement the Governing Council’s monetary policy decisions and to monitor closely all relevant incoming information as concerns their impact on the medium-term outlook for price stability.