Eurosystem operates smoothly on 3 January 2000

All systems of the ECB and the national central banks of the European Union started smoothly on 3 January 2000 and are functioning correctly.

All financial markets in the Eurosystem closed without incidents on 30 December 1999 after a week with relatively limited activity. The banking sector had ample liquidity available. As TARGET was not operating on 31 December 1999 no large-value cross-border payment transactions were conducted in euro on that day.

Over the weekend, the ECB and the National Central Banks completed successfully the checking of the essential infrastructure components as well as of the critical internal and ESCB-wide systems.

As far as banknotes in circulation are concerned, there was just a marginal increase in comparison to the previous seasonal pattern (the increase for the Eurosystem was around 3 % higher than last year).