Balance Sheet: Policy Meeting and Asset Purchases

balance sheet: The central bank has already declared that rates won't be lifted until at least the end of summer, according to Market Watch. In December it ended its monthly asset purchases, the ECB's version of quantitative easing, or QE, while committing to maintaining the size of its bulked up balance sheet by reinvesting the proceeds of maturing bonds. The ECB is widely expected to announce no new actions when it concludes its first policy meeting of 2019 on Thursday. That means Draghi's postmeeting news conference will be the main event. In this case, an acknowledgment that risks to the economic outlook are skewed to the downside would set the stage for an eventual round of cheap loans designed to bolster financial conditions, though any concrete action would be unlikely to come before the next policy meeting in March, said Oliver Rakau, chief German economist at Oxford Economics, in a note. And as is often the case with monetary policy and financial markets, words count nearly as much as actions. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.