- Ewald Nowotny, ECB Governing Council member
The Euro zone current account, a measure of the financial health of the currency bloc, narrowed on a seasonally adjusted in November, according to the European Central Bank. The current account surplus came in at 18.1 billion euros in the reported month, down from 19.5 billion euros in October. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, however, the surplus narrowed to 24.6 billion euros, compared with a revised 29.7 billion a month earlier.
A long-awaited event in the Euro zone will take this week, as the ECB board members meet to discuss possible ways to revive the faltering Euro area's economy and combat deflation. This would be a crucial event, which will mark a new era in the ECB's history, as investors anticipate a launch of US-style broad-based government bond purchases. Analysts predict the expected scale of the progamme that policymakers may come up with should range from 500 billion euros to 1 trillion euros. However, Ewald Nowotny, ECB Governing Council member and the chief of Australia's central bank, said that the Euro zone's central bank has a limited ammunition at its disposal to combat long-term stagnation in the region. While inflation has been long below the ECB's targeted level of close to but below 2%, Nowotny said he did not see a prolonged period of deflation. In December, consumer prices fell for the first time since 2009, dropping 0.1% on month for an annual 0.2% drop.
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