Market participants have reacted with a healthy dose of scepticism to the European Central Bank's long-awaited quantitative easing programme, saying the move may not be enough to revive the struggling eurozone economy.
On Thursday, ECB president Mario Draghi announced plans to buy €60bn of assets per month from this March, a programme that will last until September 2016 or until inflation - currently at -0.2% - moves back towards the central bank’s 2% target. The scope of the monetary easing is larger than had been anticipated, and the likes of HSBC’s currency strategists suggested the programme is “essentially open-ended” despite the theoretical 2016 end date. In response, the euro fell 1.2% to a fresh 11-year low against the dollar of $1.142, and the drop continued on Friday: the euro hit a 12-year ...
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