Pierre Wunsch, the ECB's governing board and president of the Belgian central bank, said the ECB had a good track record in deploying monetary instruments flexibly and would continue to do so even after the end of the epidemic crisis.
"We have shown a lot of flexibility in the past. We will discuss whether we need to change our methods in some places. Basically we have a good record. " He also said the ECB would maintain a "very supportive monetary policy" even after the end of its emergency anti-epidemic bond purchase programme (PEPP) at the end of March.
The ECB will make a key decision on whether to withdraw from the stimulus measures in the coming weeks. Wunsch's comments imply that he supports the ECB's monetary policy to maintain some flexibility when necessary.
PEPP is more flexible in terms of different asset classes and jurisdictions than regular QE, allowing policy makers to respond to different times and places when and where financial conditions change.
However, some ECB officials do not like such proposals. Madis Muller, governor of the Estonian central bank, said last month: "I don't think the flexibility of PEPP can be transferred to the previous asset purchase plan."
Behind the disagreement over the future of the ECB PEPP is a discussion about how long the current inflationary pressures in the eurozone are likely to last. Eurozone CPI rose 3.4 per cent in September from a year earlier, well above the 2 per cent target set by the ECB.
While most policy makers believe that the recent surge in inflation is largely temporary, some have begun to warn that inflationary pressures could become more lasting if price pressures lead to higher wages. "it seems that we are at some kind of inflection point," Wunsch said. We [medium-term inflation] are still below the target, so we can withstand some of the effects of a second round of inflation, but not too much. "