SINTRA, Portugal—The European Central Bank’s upcoming bond-buying program will curb rising borrowing costs for vulnerable eurozone countries while keeping up pressure on their governments to repair their budgets, ECB President Christine Lagarde said on Tuesday.
With the ECB nearing its first interest rate hike in over a decade, bond yields for Italy and other indebted countries have surged and the spread they pay over safe-haven Germany has widened.
This has spurred the ECB to speed up work on a new, yet to be unveiled, bond-buying program. Policymakers have yet to agree on the details of the scheme but most agreed the ECB had to intervene if markets moved out of synch with fundamentals….