(Bloomberg) -- The European Central Bank is ready to expand any of its instruments if it judges that the medium-term inflation outlook has worsened, Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel said.
“If we judge that further stimulus is needed, the ECB will be ready to expand any of its tools in order to achieve its price stability objective,” Schnabel said in an interview with the Financial Times published on the ECB’s website. “With respect to the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme, this concerns the size but also the composition and the duration of the program. We are ready to react to new data coming in.”
The Governing Council of the central bank is seen as increasingly likely to increase the size of its 750 billion euro ($822 billion) emergency asset purchase program when it meets next week. Officials have debated the need to remove a constraint on its bond buying that ties purchases to the size of the euro’s constituent economies.
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