Draghi’s $1.4 Trillion Question Lingers as ECB Mulls QE

Bloomberg: When Mario Draghi flies to the U.S. this week, he’ll leave a 1 trillion-euro ($1.4 trillion) question mark hanging over Europe.

While the European Central Bank president can show his new quantitative-easing plan to officials at the International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, he has yet to reveal his full hand to investors on its design. That suspense risks setting them up for disappointment, according to economists at UniCredit SpA and Deutsche Bank AG.

With the revelation last week that the ECB has simulated an anti-deflation QE program deploying as much 1 trillion euros in bond purchases, Draghi and his colleagues can expect intensifying scrutiny of the measure he divulged on April 3. Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny signaled today that action isn’t likely any time soon and asset purchases may focus on private securities rather than public debt.

“All this talk about QE has gotten markets rather excited,” Erik Nielsen of UniCredit wrote in a note yesterday. “I am sure the ECB -– like most of us -– is happy about this, but action is not imminent. What happens when markets realize that this was all just a semi-public discussion of the toolbox - – and not what will happen, unless we get an emergency?”

Multiple Models

Further clues to the ECB’s intentions may come from public appearances today by Executive Board members Vitor Constancio and Yves Mersch and Governing Council member Jens Weidmann. Draghi may face questions on the matter at a press conference on April 12 as he attends the IMF spring meeting.

Vice President Constancio will also fly to the U.S. this week, as will board members Peter Praet, the chief economist, and Benoit Coeure, the markets chief.

The ECB president’s comment last week that the Governing Council is “unanimous” on exploring tools including asset purchases prompted a surge in euro-area bonds, with Spain’s five-year note yields falling below U.S. equivalents for the first time since 2007. The Spanish yield was at 1.71 percent today, compared with 1.7 percent for the U.S. bond.

The ECB has run multiple QE models, a person with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News on April 4. Earlier that day, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the institution tested buying about 80 billion euros a month over one year and found that it could boost inflation by as much as 0.8 percentage point or as little as 0.2 percentage point. The newspaper also said officials are leaning toward a credit-enhancing program.

Raising Expectations

“We think that the central bank has raised expectations so much that it will be compelled to act,” Deutsche Bank economists including Peter Hooper wrote to investors yesterday. “The risk then is that the market is disappointed. We think that the ECB will be dragged into unveiling private QE, fleshing out what private assets, how much and for how long it would buy.”

Buying sovereign bonds could be politically and legally difficult. The ECB’s founding treaty forbids it from financing governments, and Draghi would also have to choose which countries’ bonds the central bank should acquire. If the ECB were to purchase debt proportionate to the size of its member countries, more than half would come from nations like Germany and France. Targeting peripheral countries could undermine efforts to make them rein in spending.

ABS Market

Nowotny said today that there is no immediate need for ECB action and his preference for unconventional measures is to bolster the market for asset-backed securities.

“I’d prefer measures that are as close to the market as possible -- for that reason I’d see measures to strengthen the ABS market in Europe as the first relevant measure,” Nowotny said at an event in Vienna. “That doesn’t mean that other steps are ruled out, but my personal emphasis would lie in this area.”

Draghi said last week at his monthly press conference that the ECB supports efforts to revisit crisis-era regulation that made ABSs unpalatable to investors, while recognizing that it isn’t easy to design a QE program based on private debt.

“What happens when markets realize that we are talking private assets, of which I seriously struggle to find 1 trillion euros?” UniCredit’s Nielsen said. “I really think that we are in for a disappointment –- not caused by deliberate bluffing, but by the complexity of transparency.”

 reporter on this story: Craig Stirling in London