There was a tense wait in the last few moments before Mario Draghi arrived in the press room today. After all, the European Central Bank president is rarely late.
As the minutes ticked on, the journalists sitting there looked around nervously and muttered to themselves. Might this have something to do with the momentousness of what he was expected to announce today?
It has been no secret for some months that the ECB was on the brink of unveiling its quantitative easing policy.
But the bigger question was whether the president had managed to secure the buy-in of the Germans. Might there have been a big impasse at the governing council meeting?
Might the Germans have unexpectedly launched an attack on QE? After all the anticipation, might the programme have been smaller than expected?
They needn't have worried. Now the ECB has brought out the biggest bazooka it has yet wielded.
It will spend well over a trillion of newly created euros buying (mostly) the government debt of its members. To be precise, €60bn (£45bn) a month.
Moreover, all countries bonds will be bought - including those with negative yields (eg. Germany) and those facing bail-out programmes (eg. Greece) - though the latter ones will have to behave (eg. the prospective new government of Greece).
All told, it is a bigger, more powerful programme than even some of the more optimistic investors had been expecting from the ECB. As ever, there is a catch.
For the majority of the bonds bought under QE - four-fifths - the risk of default will still be borne by the country issuing them. In other words, if the ECB buys Greek government debt and Greece defaults it can't rely on its neighbours taking the full hit.
The significance of this clause - the extent to which it undermines the rest of the programme - remains to be seen.
My hunch is that the sheer size of ECB QE (apologies for the acronyms, which are rather too common in central banking) will be enough to allay any concerns for the moment. Markets seem to agree: the euro dropped to the lowest level since 2003; stock markets around Europe leapt.
It doesn't take an expert to realise why.
The ECB has held off from money creation exercises of this sort for five years - five years in which the Bank of England, Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan have printed trillions of dollars worth of money.
During that period, the single currency area has faced stagnation and, now deflation. Investors hope that Mr Draghi may now have turned this around.
However, there are still many questions about the wisdom of QE. Some worry that it simply boosts asset prices.
Others fear that it will, ultimately, lead to hyperinflation. And there are many hawks within the Eurozone who fear that it will simply encourage troublesome countries like Greece and Spain to borrow more and face another (partly shared) default in the future.
But those concerns are for another day. Today, one should try to take in the momentousness of what has happened.
Mario Draghi has pressed the button on what many thought would never happen: a Europe-wide money creation scheme.
Oh, and the reason he was late? Well, in his own words: "Don't read too much into this small delay. It was the elevators. They're not working."
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