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The head of Germany’s central bank has said Europe’s emergency bond-buying scheme should end “in the coming year”.

Jens Weidmann’s comments in an interview with Handelsblatt newspaper on Friday are a signal that the European Central Bank will face mounting pressure to start winding down its €1.85tn pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) as the eurozone economy rebounds.

ECB president Christine Lagarde said last week it was “premature” to start discussing the winding down of PEPP, its main crisis-fighting tool. Its chief economist Philip Lane said this week it may still not have enough information to do so in September.

Mr Weidmann, one of the more conservative “hawks” on the ECB’s governing council, said: “We should certainly not withdraw support too soon.” But he added: “With further progress in coping with the pandemic, I am thoroughly optimistic that we can make progress in overcoming the crisis and then dispense our purchases more cautiously.”

Weidmann rejected recent calls for some of the extra flexibility embedded in PEPP — such as its ability to make outsized purchases of one country’s bonds — to be transferred to the traditional asset purchase programme, which will continue for much longer.

He also pushed back against the idea that the ECB should only withdraw PEPP once its inflation forecasts are back to pre-pandemic levels — something Lane has proposed. “That doesn’t convince me,” the Bundesbank boss said. “This is an extraordinary emergency program, and the emergency will probably be long gone by then.”

German producer prices for industrial products rose 7.2 per cent in May from a year earlier, their highest increase since 2008 — according to data published on Friday. The Bundesbank has predicted overall inflation in the country will exceed 4 per cent later this year — its highest for over a decade.

However, Weidmann said “the sharp rise in prices in Germany is temporary,” adding: “Stubbornly excessive inflation would require, among other things, excessive wage agreements. So far we have no evidence of this.”