On foot of David Rosenberg's pressie on Long-Term Inflation strategy switch (link here), here's the ECB Monetary Policy dilemma illustrated.
First, the steep hill 'walking':
Per chart above, the wind-in-your-face breezing down the interest rates slopes for ECB is more severe than the Fed trip so far. And the duration of this episode is longer in the ECB-own historical context:
In fact, we are into 55th month now of staying away from the mean and that is for the euro era (already too-low by historical metrics) mean. Last two episodes of deviations lasted 30 and 33 months respectively. In severity terms: average overshooting post-revision in previous downward episode (June 2003 - June 2006) was -46 bps and in this period (since March 2009) it is currently running at -146 bps or 317% of the previous episode.
Good luck to anyone believing that ECB policy (repo) rate is not going to head for 3.75-4.0%...