A liquidity trap and a realistic threat of both recession and deflation: if the Eurozone were any other major economy, official buying of government bonds would have started some time ago.

And yet, while Mario Draghi seemingly moves half the distance to outright quantitative easing with every European Central Bank meeting and major speech, somehow he, and the Eurozone, never quite arrive. Draghi took pains on Thursday to both justify quantitative easing and give observers reason to believe it was coming.

Not only did the ECB upgrade to “intends” to expand its balance sheet to 3 trillion euros, as against its earlier “expecting” this would happen, but it slashed forecasts for growth and inflation. “Early next year the governing council will reassess the monetary stimulus achieved and the outlook for price developments,” Draghi said. “We will also evaluate oil price developments.”

Despite widely reported German objections to QE, Draghi went on to imply that it would happen anyway. “Do we need to have unanimity to proceed on QE or can we have a majority? I think we don’t need unanimity,” he said.

Despite justifiable uncertainty about how well QE works and with what side effects, a look at the revised forecasts, and a consideration of the paucity of other alternatives, makes the case clear. The ECB now sees inflation of just 0.7 per cent next year, about a third of its 2 per cent target. Growth is now forecast at 1 per cent in 2015, down a chunky 0.6 percentage point from earlier projections.

And while cheaper energy will help growth, those dangerously low inflation forecasts were made when oil was about 20 per cent more expensive, implying that they are substantially too high still. There is a genuine risk that the Eurozone sees outright deflation at some point in the next year.

But still the announcement of a QE programme will wait at least until January and very likely until March, giving Draghi time not only to consider new data but also to overcome objections that it constitutes direct financing of member states and is thus a violation of its mandate. The ECB’s January meeting will also fall after the European Court of Justice’s advocate-general issues an opinion on the Outright Monetary Transactions programme of secondary market bond purchases. This may give some parameters within which Draghi will wish to keep.

The reasons for delay are structural and cultural, which is to say they have the same cause. The euro, by design, is an uneasy and conflicted union and the power at its heart, Germany, is simply not comfortable with the ways in which it has tied itself to the others.

An unintended side effect of German opposition to buying up sovereign debt is that it may nudge the ECB towards even more unconventional steps. “Put differently, the opposition to the purchases of relatively safe sovereign bonds forces the ECB to purchase much more unconventional assets such as ABS (asset-backed securities) and potentially corporate bonds,” Christian Schulz, senior economist at Berenberg Bank, wrote in a note to clients.

There is no doubting it: QE picks winners. Some people or entities benefit more by it, depending on how QE is structured and what is bought.

The irony is that these concerns about the constitutionality of the ECB effectively financing member states by buying their bonds makes the case for other assets stronger. As a result the ECB seems slightly more likely to buy corporate bonds rather than sovereign ones, or perhaps slightly more likely to increase the proportion of corporate bonds to sovereigns if they do both.

Thus the ECB will pick winners with more granularity. Large companies, which are more likely to have access to capital markets, will benefit more. Those concerns should rightly be secondary given the dire conditions within the Eurozone economy.

The broader question is whether all of this will be enough to make a substantial difference. There simply isn’t enough ABS and corporate debt to have a huge impact if the ECB is going to present the QE effort as a portfolio including sovereign debt but not dominated by it.

This makes the case for reform, and, frankly, for the kind of fiscal stimulus we shouldn’t expect.

As fiscal stimulus won’t arrive in more than symbolic amounts, and as reforms will take their time in happening and being felt, the delay in buying up sovereign bonds is a major ongoing mistake.