The European Central Bank should announce "without delay" the level of reserves member central banks must have, the ECB president, Mr Wim Duisenberg, said in Paris yesterday.
He also said the ECB would announce its monetary policy in September, and would decide "very soon" whether countries such as Britain, which will be outside the euro zone, will have access to the Target payment system between euro countries.
"You could argue that you cannot be both `in' and `out' (of the euro zone) at the same time," MrDuisenberg said in an interview with Le Figaro. Countries outside the euro, such as Britain, Denmark and Sweden, cannot be given the same access to Target as the euro zone members "or people will think that these countries are following the same monetary policy as Euroland, and that the euro is their currency," he said.
However, at the same time they cannot be excluded completely, given that they may join later, he said. "We must find a solution that would give these countries access to Target but without putting them on an equal footing" with the euro members.
The decision "should be announced very soon", he said.
The ECB board was meeting in Frankfurt yesterday and is due to hold a press conference today.
Mr Duisenberg also said the ECB "should speak out without delay" on minimum reserve requirements, because the national central banks need to know the ground rules well in advance of the launch of the euro in January to be able to adapt their computer programmes accordingly.
On the ECB's monetary policy, he said the bank would announce its monetary policy strategy in September, noting that, in order to achieve its mission of preserving price stability, there were basically two possible methods.
One was to keep a watch on the money supply, or the amount of money in circulation, the method currently followed by the Bundesbank and the Bank of France.
The other was to set an inflation target, as is the case with the Bank of England.
Mr Duisenberg also said that the $40 billion worth of reserves to be held by the ECB was sufficient, since the ECB would be able to call on individual countries' central bank reserves as well if it needed to intervene on the foreign exchange market.
