a program of the European Central Bank under which the bank makes purchases ("outright transactions") in secondary, sovereign bond markets, under certain conditions, of bonds issued by Eurozone member-states; differs from QE in that the goal is not to inject liquidity but rather to fix interest rate differences across the EU
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