By Todd Buell 

FRANKFURT--A top European Central Bank official has defended the central bank's policies to a German audience, stressing that the current low interest policy also benefits savers over the longer term.

He also said in a newspaper column that it would be detrimental for the central bank to renounce its inflation target in the face of very low inflation.

"Silently giving up on the commonly agreed inflation objective, which has served the ECB well for the last 13 years, is not an option," said Benoît Coeuré on Sunday in a column in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "This would make our monetary policy less credible and would in itself create instability."

The ECB targets inflation at just below 2% over the medium term, but it has struggled in recent years to get inflation back to target. The most recent official estimate, published on Friday, showed prices in the 19-country currency bloc fell 0.2% in April in yearly terms.

The ECB has come under fire recently in Germany. Critics accuse the central bank's low interest rate policy of hurting returns on savings accounts and pensions. Mr. Coeuré hit back, saying "people are not just savers--they are also employees, taxpayers and borrowers, as such benefiting from the low level of interest rates."

He said in the column that low interest rates are needed now "to ensure a normalization of economic conditions, including higher returns on savings in the future."

Write to Todd Buell at todd.buell@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 01, 2016 09:26 ET (13:26 GMT)