Sir, – The ECB’s quantitative easing will result in it spending over a trillion euro acquiring financial assets held by institutions at the rate of €60 billion a month until late 2016. This carries huge risk as most euro economies lack the growth and confidence needed to pull this funding from the newly cash-rich institutions into the marketplace. The danger is that the ECB’s initiative will merely inflate asset values mainly to the benefit of the already wealthy.
Surely it would be much more effective for the ECB to simply gift €3,200 directly to every euro zone citizen over the coming months. We could be much more confident that this windfall would be spent quickly and directly spur much-needed growth and inflation. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN FLANAGAN,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.