The famous euro sign landmark outside the former headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. Photo: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Any programme of quantitative easing must be big to be efficient, European Central Bank executive board member Benoit Coeure said yesterday in a newspaper interview.

“For it to be efficient, it has to be big,” Coeure told the Irish Times newspaper. “How big is big enough? This has to be an informed decision based on what we know are the transmission channels.”

Commenting on the ECB’s willingness to accept collateral from Greece in its financing operations, he said: “We have a rule that any government collateral can be accepted under monetary policy operations either only if its credit is rated well enough or, if it’s not well rated enough, if the country is under an EU/IMF programme.”

The ECB is on the verge of announcing a new scheme to buy eurozone government bonds known as quantitative easing, possibly as early as next week, to combat deflation and put the struggling economy back on a steady footing.