ECB: QE helped lending despite elusive inflation

Bloomberg

The European Central Bank says its bond-buying program was $3 trillion well spent. It said the measure helped to ease financing conditions in the euro area and contributed to achieving its price-stability mandate — even as the point when the institution will meet its inflation goal edges farther into the future.
Asset purchases of some 2.6 trillion euros ($3 trillion) over nearly four years encouraged banks to extend more credit to business and households than they would have otherwise, the ECB said on Monday. While it didn’t put an exact figure on the impact, it said that in the third quarter of last year, almost half of the annual growth rate in loans to non-
financial companies was related to QE.
The problem facing policy makers both at the ECB and at central banks across major advanced economies is the recovery in growth and credit has been slow to feed through to inflation pressures. Policy makers have revised down their outlook for underlying price pressures repeatedly in quarterly projections, most recently this month.
Still, the authors of the report say that “the path of future inflation was judged to have become more resilient over time, making it less reliant on asset purchases” and justifying the Governing Council’s decision to halt the program at the end of last year.