ECB Willing to Bend Its QE Rules in Push to Keep Up Stimulus
- Central bank publishes account of Jan. 18-19 policy meeting
- Officials see room for trade-off on asset-purchase rules
Why the ECB Is Willing to Bend Its QE Rules
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European Central Bank officials indicated that they’ll relax the application of some rules on bond buying to help maintain their “substantial” expansionary policy, opening the door to more purchases of peripheral debt.
Italian and Spanish bonds rose after the ECB said in the account of last month’s policy meeting that “limited and temporary deviations” from the capital key “were possible and inevitable” to ensure quantitative easing can be implemented as announced. Members of the Governing Council “widely” shared the view at their Jan. 18-19 meeting that “it was imperative to maintain a very substantial degree of monetary accommodation.”