Central Bank of Ireland gov and ECB governing council member out on Reuters
- if data flows over next few number of months shows more QE needed then more can be done
- unusually high amount of uncertainty in the global economy at the moment
- Chinese authorities have a lot of policy space to intervene in slow down of economy
Nothing we don't already know but the first comments, given to the Irish Time, from Lane since he took over as CB gov in Nov
One level is to make QE more routine. There was big debate in 2014 about the expansion of QE to include sovereign purchases.
"To go from not having a sovereign purchase programme to having a sovereign purchase programme that was a big decision. And then basically one year later by December there's an issue about recalibration saying we have this is it doing what we want it to do.
"By that point there was plenty of evidence that QE was effective that it was helping to increase credit growth in Europe is helping to reduce lending rates in some countries, that you see it was helping. So if you see an instrument that works, and with the evolution of data in 2015 I think the position was that more is needed for the ECB inflation target to be hit but at the same time because the European economy is growing - in 2015 there was a reasonably OK growth performance at the European level - that essentially the extent of the recalibration would be of this order.
"But it's important to say that no door has been closed. If the data flow over the next number of months is that more needs to be done, more can be done. In other words, it's now becoming more of a normalised instrument that every number of months the analysis can be updated and that if more needs to be done, more can be done"
Full interview here
EURUSD 1.0878 near session lows but crawling along the bottom for a while now
