Governing Council board member and Austrian central bank chief Ewald Nowotny said Friday that the ECB should have signaled intent to end its bond-buying program when it recently announced its intent to extend the program until September.
The comments made during an Austrian television broadcast lent support to German central bank head Jens Weidmann’s criticism the day after the ECB’s announcement. They also come amid reports that some policymakers pushed back on the decision during the bank’s recent meeting.
“This new purchasing program is valid until September 2018 and in my view we should then go about bringing it to an end if the economy develops as we currently expect it to,” Reuters reported Nowotny as saying.
“In this respect I am in absolute agreement with my German colleague,” the policymaker said in reference to Weidmann’s earlier remarks.
It was reported earlier this week that ECB board member Benoit Coeure and Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau joined Weidmann in calling for more clear signals from the ECB of policy tightening in the bank’s recent announcement.
Another sign of German impatience with the slow move towards tighter policy came on Wednesday when the German Council of Economic Experts, an advisory group organized by the country’s five major economic institutes, called for an end to QE.