FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) – The European Central Bank on Thursday launched its most aggressive effort to date to revive the region’s ailing economy – a program to buy 1.1 trillion euros in government and private bonds starting in March.
The long-awaited program was an emphatic statement of the central bank’s willingness to do all it can to rejuvenate the economy shared by the 19-nation euro currency alliance. And it showed the multinational ECB’s readiness to assert its independence against critics in Germany, the eurozone’s largest and most politically influential country.
The ECB said it would combine purchases of government bonds with an existing smaller program of private bond purchases, to total 60 billion euros a month through September 2016. All told, the program will amount to 1.1 trillion euros ($1.16 trillion).
By pumping new money into the eurozone’s banking system, the ECB’s bond purchases are intended to make loans cheaper and easier to get so companies can invest, expand and hire.
The size of the program exceeded investors’ expectations, and ECB President Mario Draghi pledged to keep it going until the central bank sees a “sustained adjustment” in lifting inflation above dangerously low levels – in other words, for as long as it takes.