European Central Bank headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. the President of the ECB is Mario Draghi, former governor of the Bank of Italy, former member of the World Bank, and former managing director of the Goldman Sachs international division (2002–2005). The bank primarily occupied the Eurotower prior to, and during, the construction of the new headquarters. The primary objective of the ECB, mandated in Article 2 of the Statute of the ECB, is to maintain price stability within the Eurozone. Its basic tasks, set out in Article 3 of the Statute, are to set and implement the monetary policy for the Eurozone, to conduct
European Central Bank the auctions, banks must be able to offer proof of appropriate collateral in the form of loans to other entities. These can be the public debt of member states, but a fairly wide range of private banking securities are also accepted. The fairly stringent membership requirements for the European Union, especially with regard to sovereign debt as a percentage of each member state's gross domestic product, are designed to ensure that assets offered to the bank as collateral are, at least in theory, all equally good, and all equally protected from the risk of inflation. The bank is based in