The FTSEurofirst 300 started at 0.9% on Friday morning after chief of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi restated the bank's readiness to start Quantative Easing to deal with the risks of low inflation in a press conference on Thursday.

HSBC's Director of FX strategy, Daragh Mayer doesn't expect to see the policy introduced immediately by the ECB and predicts the euro will continue to strengthen in the short term while the bank bides its time before rolling out QE.

SHOWS:LONDON, ENGLAND,UK (REUTERS - ACCESS ALL) (APRIL 11, 2014) HSBC, DIRECTOR FX STRATEGY, DARAGH MAHER, SAYING:

JOURNALIST ASKING DARAGH MAHER: 'Where does the euro go short term?'

DARAGH MAYER: Well the momentum is now to the topside because Draghi and his colleagues have been talking about easing for so long now, it's become a case of whether you've cried wolf just far too often. Frankly, show us the money. And so what it means is unless there's something peculiar happening on the dollar side of the equation, the kind of default is just to keep them buying a little bit of euro, a little bit of euro. So I suspect in the short term, that's where we continue because there's no sense as you said, the language isn't- oh, a move is imminent. The language is we're ready but frankly we don't think now is the time.

JOURNALIST: Given the dollar story though, how soon do we hit 1.40?

DARAGH MAYER: After lunch? I mean it's, anytime we kind of get close to the 1.40 level you get the sense the ECB rhetoric steps up. And also if you remember earlier in the week, the French Prime Minister was talking about the euro being at a problematic level and other politicians have done that. I think there is a soft kind of pain threshold for policymakers around the 1.40. So maybe the air gets a little bit thin, maybe I think we'll have a pullback before we break 1.40. So joking aside, it will be at least another week or so before we're kind of comfortably above that level.

JOURNALIST: But you guys at HSBC think the story is over the medium to longer term euro pullback?

DARAGH MAYER: Absolutely. I mean I think way you're heading if you like in the second half of this year I assume is going to be some form of QE from the ECB even if it's belated. And at the same time, I think the Fed debate will be done with tapering to a large extent, or at least talking about it. The Fed debate that will have a conversation like this will be on when's the first interest rate hike happening. And if you're in that kind of divergence, it's going to have a profound impact on the currency. It hasn't as yet because we're not having that debate. We're still wondering if the ECB will ease and we're still wondering how much more the tapering will- how much longer that will take. But that conversation changes and that's when I think euro/dollar falls.

JOURNALIST: Mentioned at the top, the Tokyo market, the equity market off 8.5%, 9% in the past month. I want to talk about dollar/yen. The yen had its biggest weekly gain in four weeks. We were talking about this before the show. You were surprised by the lack of a really big move overnight. What does that suggest to you?

DARAGH MAYER: It could suggest a bottom that we've had an adjustment, and ordinarily if you have that kind of Nikkei move overnight, you would have anticipated that dollar/yen would have been quite a bit lower. You can dispute the causality but certainly the correlations have been strong. And yes, so you would have assumed it should have been quite a bit lower. It wasn't, so maybe that appetite for buying yen is kind of done. It's been sated for now which means of course people are beginning to look towards rebuilding some dollar/yen longs. But obviously that's contingent upon equity markets globally not continuing to fall in the way that we saw yesterday.