ECB bond-buying ready after court decision: Coeure

Coeure: Sounds more clearer.

Reuters/Frankfurt

The status of the European Central Bank’s flagship crisis-fighting tool is unchanged after the assertion of Germany’s top court that it exceeded the bank’s mandate, ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said.

Speaking to Reuters as part of a series of interviews with top policymakers across the euro zone, Coeure said the ECB had no need to use the so-called Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme now.

Germany’s top court will refer a complaint against the OMT to the European Court of Justice but, in an apparent effort to direct the ECJ’s deliberations, it said last week the plan appeared to violate a ban on the ECB funding governments.“The status of the OMT is not changed. It is ready to be used but it is highly unlikely it would have to be used at the moment,” Coeure said.

The OMT, announced by President Mario Draghi in September 2012 at the height of the sovereign debt crisis and as yet unused, is widely credited with pulling the euro zone back from the brink.

Its power lies in the promise of potentially unlimited sovereign bond purchases - a prospect that calmed fears about the currency area zone falling apart and backed up Draghi’s vow to do “whatever it takes” to save the bloc.

The decision by the German Constitutional Court has left investors asking questions about the validity of the OMT. The head of Germany’s ZEW economic think tank said on Monday the measure had been seriously weakened.

 With the prospect of the eurozone breaking up having receded sharply since 2012, the ECB is now more focused on weak price pressures in the bloc, where inflation is running at just 0.7% - well below its target of just under 2%.

“We’re not seeing deflation in the eurozone,” Coeure said. “We see low inflation, slowing increasing from the current low levels back to 2%.”

To help money flow more evenly across the currency area, Coeure said the idea of cutting into negative territory the rate the ECB pays banks to hold their deposits overnight was “a very possible option”.

“That is something we are considering very seriously. But you should not expect too much of it,” he said of a negative deposit rate.

The ECB left policy on hold last week but President Mario Draghi put markets on alert for possible action in March, saying the Governing Council would have more information at its disposal by then, including new forecasts from the bank’s staff that will extend into 2016 for the first time.

Coeure took over this month as the ECB’s top negotiator in Brussels, taking on the key portfolio in a board reshuffle following Joerg Asmussen’s departure.