The ECB was asserting its independence. It was putting Europe’s governments on notice. It would be up to them to take responsibility for the debt markets.29 Nor were interest rates the only way to send the message. Without fanfare, indeed, without public announcement of any kind, in mid-March the European Central Bank stopped purchases of eurozone sovereign bonds and introduced differentiated haircuts on repos for lower-rated bonds.30 It took a few weeks for the markets to register the serious tightening of credit conditions. Then they sold off. The yield spread between the safest and riskiest
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