Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING, believes the ECB seems to have agreed on what to do, but the recent comments of several hawks indicate that the heated debate is still ongoing. Traditional hawks, such as Jens Weidmann from Germany, Klaas Knot from the Netherlands and Sabina Lautenschlager on the ECB Executive Council, opposed the restart of QE. "In our opinion, even if the group of skeptic hawks has grown, it still looks like a minority. Since inflationary expectations are likely to be far from the ECB's goals, which means that the vast majority will support new incentives. And, even despite the opposition, it is doubtful that this is only a reduction in the rate. In this regard, and for a better understanding of what the ECB is currently thinking of doing, we should pay attention to the speech of the ECB chief economist Philip Lane."
According to data provided by Lane, the ECB's unconventional measures since 2014 have boosted economic growth and inflation by about 0.5 percentage points. It is worth noting that almost half of the impact gave QE. However, when the ECB launched QE in 2015, inflation was expected to accelerate from 0.5% in 2014 to 1.3% in 2016. Currently, there is a risk of a serious pullback up to deflation due to actual economic stagnation and low inflation, the likelihood of this is as high as in 2014/5. "Thus, we expect the ECB to launch a "final firework": a 20 bp cut in deposit rates, a revaluation of TLTRO and a restart of QE with a budget of about 30 billion euros per month. At the same time, there is a risk that the opposition, the "hawks", will convince them to slightly delay the launch of QE," Brzeski said.
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