FRANKFURT (Reuters) -The European Central Bank is still far away from resuming debt purchases to inject liquidity into the banking system as it first needs to work off more of the bonds it bought over a decade of easy policy, ECB board member Isabel Schnabel said on Thursday.

The ECB has been slowly mopping up some of the trillions of euros it pumped into the financial system under a number of bond-buying schemes in 2015-22, when it was trying to revive inflation that was then too low.

Schnabel, who is in charge of the ECB’s markets operations, said this ongoing “quantitative normalisation” process will continue until she and her colleagues on the Governing Council deem enough bonds have run off the central bank’s balance sheet.

“Purchases under the new portfolio will only start once th

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