One by one, the big central banks are edging back to something that feels like normality. Following the lead of the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank yesterday announced that it would halt the programme of quantitative easing on which it embarked in 2015 amid a seriously weak economy and the threat of corrosive deflation.
At first sight, the move may look premature. The ECB is betting that the softness seen in many indicators of the eurozone economy in recent months will prove a temporary weak spot rather than something more serious. The history of central bank expectations — not just in the eurozone — over the past decade is one of habitual over-optimism, particularly of the ability of the economy to generate enough growth to fulfil the economy’s output capacity and generate higher inflation.
Yet more important than this particular decision is whether the ECB maintains the activist stance it has taken throughout Mario Draghi’s time as its president — a tenure which, regrettably, is to end next year. The bank must keep the crisis toolkit that it has assembled over the past decade well oiled and ready to redeploy if Europe’s economy should weaken again.