Too soon to scale back ‘emergency’ pandemic bond buying - ECB’s Visco

CNBC reports that Italian Central Bank Governor Ignazio Visco said that despite gradually recovering economies and summer tourism reopening in many parts of the euro zone, it’s not time to end emergency stimulus measures yet.

Visco was referring specifically to the pandemic emergency bond purchases, or PEPP, deployed in spring 2020 to shore up the economy as the pandemic-induced economic crisis engulfed Europe and much of the world. 

Asked whether he felt the calls by some European officials for lowering the bond purchases were premature, Visco replied, “We have not discussed this.” But he added, “The effects of the pandemic are not only on the volatility of markets, but also on the ability to go back to the 2% aim,” referring to the euro zone’s inflation target.

“Therefore until we are not, well, somehow moving towards that target, I think we have to maintain all our instruments, and we will discuss them in our meetings,” Visco said, stressing the ECB’s reliance on incoming economic data. 

“Obviously this is something that is both data-driven and it’s not path-dependent, it is state-dependent, so this is really what we have to do — observe, understand and then decide,” Visco added.