"Our hope is that still 2021 is the year of recovery but in two phases and phase one is clearly one that it is still plagued with a very high level of uncertainty,” Lagarde said speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
As part of economic relief, Lagarde announced that the ECB would preserve the financing conditions "for an extended period of time" to provide extensive access to affordable funding and help overcome pandemic consequences.
On the other hand, ECB Executive Board member Philip Lane said on Monday that the bank "routinely looks at a wide range of measures to gauge the state of financing conditions for all sectors of the economy."
If favorable financing conditions can be maintained, he concluded, the pandemic emergency purchase program (PEPP) "need not be used in full."