The first-ever minutes of an ECB policy meeting were published Thursday. They also revealed that at its January meeting – when it announced its hotly anticipated QE program to help kickstart the moribund euro zone economy – policymakers were also concerned about low inflation.
OBSERVE:
Taking into account both the weakened medium-term outlook for price stability and the smaller than envisaged monetary stimulus introduced by the policy measures adopted in June and September 2014, the prevailing degree of monetary policy accommodation was seen to fall short of sufficiently countering the heightened risks to the ECB's medium-term price stability objective," the minutes said.
"Against this background, there was a broadly shared view that the conditions were fully in place for taking additional monetary policy action at the current meeting."
The "accounts," as the ECB calls them, shed light on one of the most crucial ECB meetings in years, in which President Mario Draghi announced the launch of a 60 billion euro ($70 billion) private and public bond-buying program.
Growth-sapping deflation
January's announcement from the ECB means the central bank has joined the U.S. Federal Reserve, Bank of England and Bank of Japan in implementing a quantitative easing (QE) scheme in an effort to bolster its economy.
As much as a trillion euros of euro zone government bonds could be purchased under the program, which is due to begin in March.
One of the main aims of QE will be to drag the euro zone out of growth-sapping deflation and back towards the ECB's "just under 2 percent" target. Prices in the region fell by 0.6 percent year-on-year in January, after sliding into deflation for the time since 2009 in December.
