To safeguard price stability

Price stability is the main goal of the Eurosystem. Every central bank strives to keep the value of money stable by making sure that inflation is neither too high nor too low but remains stable and predictable. However, price stability does not mean that prices cannot go up. In the euro area, the objective is to have an inflation rate of close to 2 % in the medium term. The European Central Bank’s revised monetary strategy defines this inflation target as being symmetric, meaning that negative and positive deviations of inflation from this target are equally undesirable.