John Maynard Keynyes, back in 1936, had to quote Ibsen's Wild Duck in order to convey to his reader the problem that a central bank faces when interest rates fall to zero but the economy is still in the doldrums
Warrants are essentially options to buy more shares at the original low share price.
context: private buyers of bank shares got to buy in at a low low price
the Outright Monetary Transactions programme. [...] the ECB would step into the money markets to buy unlimited numbers of Italian and Spanish bonds in order to stabilise their value--and with them the interest rates that the Italian and Spanish governments paid to refinance their public debt.
it worked, because bond dealers took the ECB at its word and started buying Italian/Spanish bonds and so the ECB never had to actually step in during the first year
the Bundesbank waiting in the wings to denounce Mario Draghi as an apostate
given the bank's parlous state
