From these funds and through OMT, the Eurozone's central bank can, henceforth, buy government-issued bonds that mature in 1 to 3 years, provided the bond-issuing countries agree to certain domestic economic measures – the latter being the so-called term of "conditionality".
Yet, it was evaluated to have delivered a significant positive impact to solve the problem with a broken monetary transaction mechanism, resulting in some more fairly priced interest rate levels for states under sovereign financial support programmes from EFSF/ESM.
As none of them, however, had met the fourth condition for support (suffering from distressed interest rates upon the time of their regain of complete access to private lending markets), still no OMTs had been activated by ECB.
According to economics professor Paul De Grauwe, economist Yuemei Ji and researchers at the Cass Business School, this decline can be mainly attributed to OMT, making the sheer announcement of the program effective in its own right.
[14] Post-Keynesian economists have expressed their doubts about OMT's effectiveness in dealing with the European debt crisis, some arguing that the program will "fail", because "it doesn't address the core problem – that southern Europe is in depression and the only way out [of it] is for budget deficits to expand.
Moreover, "the scenario analysis suggests that the reduction in bond yields due to OMT announcements is associated with a significant increase in real activity, credit, and prices in Italy and Spain with relatively muted spillovers in France and Germany.
[18] Germany's Central Bank president Jens Weidmann, along with German economy minister Philipp Roesler had expressed their opposition to ECB's bond-buying plan, arguing that it might erode "the willingness of Eurozone member-states to implement reforms".