The European Central Bank may act to address risks to growth as soon as next month should economic data disappoint, Governing Council member Luc Coene said.
“The ECB has never ruled out things beforehand,” Coene, who heads the Belgian central bank, said in an interview in Washington late yesterday when asked if an interest-rate cut were warranted. “If the data in early October shows that things are worse than we anticipated we will look at the kind of decisions we have to take for that.”
European policy makers have come under pressure from counterparts around the world as a failure to contain the region’s sovereign-debt crisis stokes concern the world is on the brink of another recession. Economists at Barclays Capital and Royal Bank of Scotland Plc predict the ECB will reverse the two rate increases it implemented earlier this year.
Potential measures by the ECB include the reintroduction of longer-term bank loans, with maturities of 12 months or even longer, Coene said. He added that cutting the benchmark rate “certainly would not help” in bringing down longer-term rates.
“We could perfectly do that when we feel there is an urgent need for that -- I don’t think so for the moment, but it could be in two weeks,” Coene said, referring to the ECB extending long-term bank loans. The ECB is scheduled to meet Oct. 6. The benchmark rate is currently 1.5 percent, compared with near-zero for the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England’s 0.5 percent.
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