The chairman of China's massive sovereign wealth fund has said that monetary easing in the euro zone would be "good news" and open up market opportunities.
China Investment Corporation (CIC), which is responsible for managing some of the country's massive currency reserves, was founded in 2007 and has $575 billion of assets under management, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, and is the fourth-largest wealth fund of its kind in the world.
Chairman Ding Xuedong, speaking to CNBC at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, said that that any upcoming stimulus measures announced by the European Central Bank (ECB) would be justified.
"I think ECB's position is reasonable, and we will take that into consideration when we look at market opportunities in Europe. I think on the whole it may be good news for us," he told CNBC Friday.
Ding added that quantitative easing (QE) policies adopted by the U.S. Federal Reserve has resulted in capital flowing back to the United States. This, he explained, has been at the expense of the European economy with outflows of capital from the market working against its recovery.
"Under these circumstances, stimulus measures taken by the ECB will somehow moderate this phenomenon. And growth and the recovery of the euro zone economies will contribute to the wider growth and recovery of the global economy," he said.
Markets participants have been in cautious mood in the last week in anticipation of what exactly the ECB will announce at its June 5 meeting of its Governing Council. President Mario Draghi has made a clear indication that fresh stimulus would be announced but analysts are torn between exactly what the new policies would involve.
Among the measures available to the ECB are a further cut to interest rates, some targeted measures aimed at boosting lending to small and mid-sized firms or even a Federal Reserve-style QE program. This comes as consumer price growth in the region has been weak and some recent gross domestic product figures have surprised on the downside.
