In effect, he turned the ECB into a lender of last resort for governments.
Also, a classic currency board, unlike a central bank, cannot act as a lender of last resort.
The Federal Reserve was created to serve as a lender of last resort.
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However, there are two ways that the ECB could allow such a lender of last resort to come into existence.
That can be dealt with in the normal manner of the central bank acting as a lender of last resort.
The euro's design was flawed, without fiscal integration or a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.
The Fed acted not in competition with the private sector but as a lender of last resort during an extreme emergency.
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We have long argued that the single currency needs a lender of last resort, a banking union and limited debt mutualisation.
The car companies always want a lender of last resort who will finance loans and leases, and help the car company move the metal.
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It would still need the backing of a lender of last resort, but a market-oriented reform might make banks better able to cope with trouble.
But no, he has not ruled out the ECB acting as a lender of last resort for European financial institutions - particularly in the crisis economies.
Others think that it could play a useful role as a lender of last resort, providing governments with short-term loans to tide them over a temporary crisis.
Because each lacks its own central bank to act as a lender of last resort, troubled countries can more easily be pushed into default as markets panic.
The European Central Bank, which is not a lender of last resort even to banks in the euro zone, has been sniffy about lending to countries outside it.
When the Federal Reserve steps in as a lender of last resort, which it's had to do repeatedly since this financial crisis began, it's providing insurance that is paid for by the American taxpayer.
To act as a lender of last resort.
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In Davos recently David Cameron argued that successful currency unions had vital features in common: a lender of last resort for the state, economic integration and flexibility to deal with shocks, fiscal transfers and collective debt.
All of that raises the relative liquidity premium of the US Treasuries and of any nation or indeed any organization that has a Lender of Last Resort with access to unlimited liquidity, that is a printing press.
Rocholl added that the ECB has become a guarantor for the private and public sectors in the eurozone: "The ECB is more than a lender of last resort, not only to the banks, but also to nation-states, " he said.
But you fail to mention the most important one of all: that a central bank of any country which has only variable access to international capital markets may have a problem in acting as a lender of last resort to its banking system.
"If we mandate that the Fed is not involved in supervision then we make hasty, uninformed decisions inevitable when it is called upon as a lender of last resort, " said University of Chicago business school professor and Fed consultant Anil Kashyap in his prepared testimony.
Put it another way: by expanding its emergency liquidity facilities, the ECB signalled that it was willing to keep acting as a lender of last resort for banks - and by extension, that it was willing to keep all 17 of the eurozone's national financial systems afloat, while the sovereign debt crisis is resolved.
But as Icesave grew, European authorities realised that Iceland's coffers were far too small to provide deposit insurance to savers, and that its central bank lacked reserves to act as a credible lender of last resort in the case of a run.
The problem is that the EFSF would probably need authority to borrow something like 2tn euros, or more than four times the EFSF's current size - according to Royal Bank of Scotland, for example - for it to be seen as a credible lender of last resort to eurozone members deprived of access to finance from conventional sources.
No doubt the world needs a formidable lender of last resort, for which the IMF seems best suited.
Does this mean that the ECB is ruling out acting as a "lender of last resort" for the eurozone?
On this view, the eurozone has a lot of problems, but at least it does not now have the added problems associated with being a currency area without a true lender of last resort.
The ECB's rebuff appeared to toughen Madrid's insistence that the only solution to a crisis that is pushing its borrowing costs close to unsustainable levels is for the ECB to become a government lender of last resort.
Given all the criticism the ECB has been getting about its failure to be a "lender of last resort" for the Euro, you have to wonder whether Draghi wanted to remind his audience that the ECB was already playing that function, to a significant extent, in the enormous amounts of emergency liquidity it had provided periphery banks (see blog Sir Mervyn King's two messages).
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