Yet low unemployment has failed to send inflation to the 2 per cent target.
Interest rates were unchanged, with the headline rate still at 0.05%.
The U.S. Dollar jumped on the news from the United Kingdom and Euro Zone, sending December Comex Gold prices sharply lower.
“When the world economy is fragile, you end up restraining demand”, says Stephen Oliner, a former Fed economist who is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank.
ANALYST’S VIEW. “People are basically trading headline after headline right now, and Draghi’s comments about raising QE was good, but then you see deflation coming and cutting the GDP forecast and that’s not good”, said analyst Larry Peruzzi, director of global trading at Cabrera Capital Markets in Boston.
The hint at further stimulus, which would inject more euros into the financial system, weighed on the currency and boosted stocks.
After cutting interest rates as low as they could go, Draghi launched a massive stimulus program earlier this year aimed at firing up growth and inflation.
The most recent data, published Monday, showed annual inflation in the currency bloc at only 0.2% in August. It is doing that by printing money and pushing it into the economy through monthly purchases of government and corporate bonds.
Consumer prices are forecast to rise 0.1% in 2015, 1.1% in 2016 and 1.7% in 2017. The program is set to run though September 2016.
Draghi (pictured) said: “We will fully implement our monthly asset purchases of €60bn”.
The rate decision was expected because the bank has said the current rate is as close to zero as it can get.
This was a very downbeat press conference from the European Central Bank today in which it repeatedly stressed the negative effects of the external environment on the euro area and its ability to achieve price stability.
Mario Draghi, the ECB president, said the bank’s 1 trillion euro-plus asset-buying programme was working smoothly, if slowly, and the policy-making Governing Council was ready and willing to take further policy action but decided it would premature to do so now.
KEEPING SCORE: Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 1.4 percent to 18,352.98 and South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.2 percent to 1,918.34. Banks added to Wednesday’s advance, with Wells Fargo & Co. and U.S. Bancorp up more than 1.8 percent.
European markets rose. The head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, said the bank is ready to give the region a bigger dose of stimulus should inflation fail to pick up.
“More recently, renewed downside risks have emerged to the outlook for growth and inflation” from low oil prices and the economic slowdown in China, it said. Brent crude, a benchmark for global oils, was down 5 cents at $50.45 a barrel in London.
The Stoxx 50 index of leading European shares was up 1.5 percent, while the euro was steady at $1.1230.
Markit’s survey was notable for the fact that Spain recorded by far the sharpest growth in economic activity among the top four eurozone nations in August, seeing its second-strongest expansion over the past eight and a half years.