ECB COUNCIL MEETING AND QUANTITATIVE EASING ON GERMAN TERMS

When the European Central Bank’s (ECB) governing council meets on 22nd January,  it will take a historic decision. Among the main central banks, the ECB alone has abstained from a big programme of quantitative easing involving the creation of money to buy sovereign bonds with the aim of spurring growth and inflation. The economic case for QE in the euro area is overwhelming: the feeble economic recovery that has followed Europe’s double-dip recession is faltering; headline inflation has turned negative and longer-term inflation expectations have also declined to a worrying extent. Mario Draghi, the ECB’s president, seems determined to adopt QE in some form, but he will have to compromise on the way that the risks are shared among the euro-zone national central banks in order to get the policy through.

Insiders expect a programme of sovereign-bond purchases of around €500 billion to be announced on Thursday. Anything less would be likely to disappoint markets that have already been anticipating a move by the ECB to adopt QE, causing, for example, the euro to weaken. The need to purchase government bonds arises from the scale with which the ECB needs to intervene. The central bank wants to raise the balance-sheet of the Eurosystem (the ECB along with the euro zone’s 19 national central banks from €2.2 trillion to €3 trillion. Since late last year it has been conducting a form of QE by buying private assets, mainly covered bonds, a particularly safe form of debt issued by banks, and also some asset-backed securities. Such purchases may reach around €200 billion over a year. But the amount of eligible and available covered bonds, of around €1 trillion, is dwarfed by the value of sovereign bonds, of over €6 trillion. At one time it seemed that the ECB might buy conventional corporate bonds, but it seems to have decided that the market is too illiquid for it to operate in at scale.

But a big bond-buying programme is tricky in a monetary union where there is not one federal government but 19 national ones, of widely varying creditworthiness, ranging from triple-A for Germany’s to junk for Greece’s. The indications are that Mr Draghi will have to bow to stipulations set by Jens Weidmann, head of the German Bundesbank, if he is to get QE approved. Most notably, purchases of sovereign debt will not be made under the usual risk-sharing arrangements at the ECB, whereby the 19 national central banks of the euro zone share any losses in rough proportion to the size of their economies. The Bundesbank would normally expect to shoulder a quarter of any losses incurred by the ECB. But in this instance, each central bank is likely to be largely responsible for buying the bonds of its own country and will have to bear any losses on them on its own.

That is a good deal for the Bundesbank, because German bonds are so safe. But it marks a big break in precedent and will be seen as unsatisfactory by many members of the governing council. The compromise is necessary because on this occasion Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, is backing Mr Weidmann.  Mrs Merkel fears that QE will allow laggard governments, including those of Italy and France, to further delay indispensable structural reforms. The chancellor also worries that purchases made through the usual risk-sharing approach would in effect create by the backdoor "Eurobonds", jointly issued bonds with the risk mutually shared among member states, to which she is strongly opposed.

Some way will also have to be found to deal with the problem of Greece, which in elections on 25 January may choose a new government that seeks some form of debt relief and tries to backtrack on reforms. One possible solution might be to stipulate that junk-rated sovereign bonds will be bought only if the country concerned is abiding by the terms of a euro-zone bail-out programme (Greece's is due to expire at the end of February).

Markets may shrug off these messy details in their elation that QE is at long last under way, injecting money into the euro-zone economy and signalling the ECB’s commitment to arrest the fall in inflation. Most members of the ECB’s council will grudgingly take the view that it is better to get a big amount of QE along these lines than a much smaller dose with the usual risk-sharing arrangements. The effect of the QE that the council undertakes may also be stronger if, as is now expected, the bonds purchased will be held to maturity. But a package along these lines will set an unfortunate precedent, for it will embody the very fragmentation within the euro area that the ECB has been seeking to combat. That will add to the danger that the long-awaited QE programme may be coming too late to arrest the slide into a deflationary mindset