(MENAFN- AFP) The European Central Bank will decide on the scale of a planned sovereign debt purchase at next week's meeting, a board member said Friday, in the clearest sign that the bank will launch the controversial stimulus measure.
"We will take the American and British experiences into account in order to determine the amount of debt to buy so as to reestablish confidence and bring inflation back to a level close to and lower than 2 percent, while keeping in mind the institutional specificities of the eurozone," Benoit Coeure told French newspaper Liberation.
"We should also decide if the purchase would concern the debt of certain countries or if it should be balanced across the entire eurozone," said Coeure.
The ECB has been priming the markets for such purchases, with president Mario Draghi saying the bank had few other options at its disposal to counter the risk of deflation.
The central bank's mandate is to keep price inflation at just under 2.0 percent, but it fell to a negative 0.2 percent in December, raising fears that the eurozone could fall into a cycle of damaging deflation where falling prices lead to job losses and lower output.
Coeure stressed that the aim of such a stimulus operation is to "ensure confidence in the capacity of the central bank to stabilise inflation".
The French ECB board member said that there is an increasing risk that "growth and inflation remain constantly weak, that we slump into an 'economy of 1 percent -- growth at 1 percent and inflation at 1 percent".
"This prospect is sufficiently dangerous for us to be worried about," he said.
Coeure also said the Islamist attacks in France has made it even more important for Europeans to stand united "including in the economic sphere".
"The attacks have underlined that a part of European youth are on the fringes, have dropped out, are jobless, at risk and in extreme cases, led astray in delinquency and even terrorism. Without growth, this phenomenon can only worsen."
Touching on another burning question surrounding the bloc, the ECB board member said there is "no question of Greece leaving the euro" following January 25 elections which are feared to bring anti-austerity party Syriza to power.
"The stakes of the election are elsewhere, it's the composition of the cocktail of reforms that will allow this country to definitively exit the crisis and to further integrate with European economies," he said.
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