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Frankfurt - From his office on the 41st floor of the gleaming new European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters, Mario Draghi's view stretches far beyond Frankfurt's high-rise financial centre and he doesn't like what he sees.
The darkening outlook for the eurozone's flat and nearly inflation-less economy, exacerbated by tumbling oil prices, is driving him inexorably towards radical action.
Bank on the ECB president to fight the risk of deflation with an expanded programme of asset buying early next year, probably in March, despite deep misgivings in Germany's Bundesbank and from German public opinion.
Painful economic reforms
Draghi has worked for months to build support for what would be the biggest leap in the 15-year-old bank's history - printing money to buy eurozone sovereign bonds on a large scale, so-called quantitative easing or QE.
Germans are historically allergic to such a policy, which some fear could trigger 1920s-style hyperinflation, create asset price bubbles and give eurozone laggards an excuse to avoid painful economic reforms. Many believe it amounts to illegal financing of governments through the back door.
Draghi confronted such concerns head-on last week, saying that to allow inflation to remain far below the ECB's target of almost 2% would breach its mandate.
"Not to pursue our mandate would be illegal," he said, turning the legal argument on his German critics.
Quantitative easing
The bank has just lowered its inflation forecast for next year to 0.7% and that did not take account of the latest fall in oil prices.
Rebutting German concerns one by one, Draghi said quantitative easing had proved effective in the United States and Britain; was clearly within the bank's remit of ensuring price stability and did not require a unanimous decision.
However, the reluctance of the ECB's biggest shareholder and its allies in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the Baltics has forced him to move gradually.
The prevailing Anglo-Saxon view is that ECB action, if it comes, will be too late and probably too little.
Draghi's 2012 pledge to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the euro was a turning point that halted market turmoil during the euro debt crisis, showing the ECB to be the only federal European institution able to act.
