DRAGHI DELIVERS A BAZOOKA - euro;60 BILLION/MONTH QE

Half an hour before the much anticipated Presser, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that there would be no change in the interest rates. This means that the marginal lending facility rate remains at 0.3% and deposit facility rate remains unchanged at -0.2%. That raised no eyebrows and then all continued to wait for the all-important announcement on QE.

The announcement was scheduled for 6.45 PM (IST) but even past 7.10, there was no news. Rumour mills started, “They can’t reach an agreement” and then finally, the conference started.

Wearing his “whatever it takes” previous meet light blue tie, Draghi started, saying that one should not read too much into this delay, blaming it on the elevator.

Humour apart, the QE did come in - €60 billion of asset purchases a month until September 2016. This was once open ended in some sense as this bond buying was pegged to the inflation – this buying will continue till inflation hits 2%. Thus the message which comes across is that this QE will continue for as long as it takes and as much as required.  This is basically telling the Germans and other conservatives, “take that!”

The stick coming with this carrot is – QE will be based on the national central banks’ share of ECB, meaning the ECB will not bear the burden; it will supervise. Draghi said that some risk sharing will happen – only to the extent of 20% of any losses on assets bought by the national central banks; rest of the loss will be the banks.

This was a real bazooka as most had expected around €40 billion/month bond buying; we are talking about €1.26 trillion total bond buying and that is most certainly way beyond market and all analyst estimates.

The QE program in USA worked and while it ended its bond buying, Europe is finally giving up its austerity drive, which did more harm than benefit. Thus there is a diverging trend now visible, like a fault line dividing the land – USA is all set to hike rates while in other parts of the world, rates are coming down – apart from the surprise rate cut by India this week, other nations like Denmark, Turkey, Canada and Peru also announced rate cuts. And while USA has given up the crutches of QE for promoting growth, Europe is now adopting the very same crutches.

The European markets celebrated this generous QE but awaited details in the ensuing Press Conference about what will comprise the bond buying; at the moment the entire loss sharing and key capital seemed too complicated and further details will decide the trend of the markets.