[FRANKFURT] The European Central Bank's massive bond purchase programme, known as quantitative easing, or QE, got off to a good start with purchases at 3.2 billion euros (Son the first day, a top ECB official said Tuesday.

ECB executive board member Benoit Coeure said that during Monday's kick-off day for the programme, the ECB and the central banks of the 19 eurozone nations purchased a total 3.2 billion euros (S$4.76b) in bonds.

That put the QE programme on track to attain its monthly goal of 60 billion euros worth of buyback of public and private sector debt, he said at a seminar in Frankfurt.

The ECB's QE scheme has already been used by the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to stimulate their economies.

But QE has been a long time coming on mainland Europe and is regarded as the ultimate weapon in the ECB's vast anti-deflation armoury, the culmination of a long series of unprecedented measures to bring the eurozone's flat-lining economic recovery back to life.

The ECB hopes that by buying bonds off investors they will invest the money elsewhere, thus boosting growth and preventing a dangerous cycle of falling prices from setting in.

AFP