"The main goal of the ECB at present is to stabilize the Eurosystem. This is an arduous task that will require landmark reforms in the financial system and in the way that governments of the member countries cooperate. It may take as long as twenty years for these reforms to be implemented, yes, twenty.
Based on this assessment, a number of conclusions can be drawn.
First, the ECB is likely to embark on a number of successive asset purchase programs in order to promote credit creation to the real economy, in particular to smaller size companies that cannot access credit through capital markets. We are now seeing the beginning of this in the form of a targeted quantitative easing.
Second, the ECB is unlikely to take a “bazooka” approach as the Federal Reserve did. Aggressive quantitative easing would relieve governments from the pressure of implementing the reforms and this is not what the ECB wants. We therefore expect QE programs to be a little too late and a little too small by design."
