The European Central Bank has already embarked, in effect, on emergency “quantitative easing” to boost the eurozone economy – but stands ready to do more if deflation risks emerge, according to Christian Noyer, governor of the Banque de France.

Hugely-expanded ECB operations to pump extra liquidity into the banking system, renewed last week, had taken the central bank clearly into “non-standard monetary policy,” Mr Noyer said in an interview with the Financial Times. “It is a way of doing quantitative easing, certainly.”

His comments amounted to a defence of measures taken so far by the ECB to combat the worst recession to hit continental Europe since the second world war. The Bank of England is starting a quantitative easing programme in which it is creating ￡75bn in new money to buy assets but ECB policymakers believe the significance of its own actions, in which it is flooding the bank system with funds, has been underplayed.