As European Central Bank Eases Emergency Measures, Risks May Lurk<br />“It would therefore take a huge leap of faith to say<br />that crises won’t continue to be a regular feature of the current financial system,” said the report, which listed the withdrawal of central bank support as one factor that could trigger the next meltdown<br />The central bank’s benchmark interest rate is zero, and investors are so desperate for safe places to put their money<br />that corporations like Daimler, the German automotive giant, have been able to issue bonds that pay no interest.<br />Since early 2015, the bank has used newly created money to buy bonds<br />and other assets worth more than 2 trillion euros, or about $2.35 trillion — a sum roughly equal to the annual economic output of India.<br />No one knows for sure what unpleasant surprises may lurk when it begins the process of so-called tapering — taking away the easy money<br />that made it possible for banks to lend and governments to borrow even after investors had largely deserted them during the worst of the downturn.<br />FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank appeared ready on Thursday to begin dismantling a decade’s worth of emergency measures<br />that helped keep the eurozone from disintegrating during the financial crisis.<br />As a first step, the central bank’s Governing Council has signaled it will provide a timetable on Thursday for its rolling back of purchases of government<br />and corporate debt, a form of virtual money-printing known as quantitative easing.<br />Such events have occurred regularly since the world’s economic powers abandoned fixed<br />exchange rates in 1973, a recent report by analysts at Deutsche Bank pointed out.
