LONDON (Reuters) - Providing forward guidance on future interest rates of the type of large scale asset purchases being used by other major central banks would not be easy to apply in the euro zone, one of the ECB's top policymakers said on Thursday. "Large scale asset purchase programmes targetted at capital markets would not be very helpful in the euro area," ECB Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen said at an Economist banking conference.

The United States will put a redesigned $100 bill, including an array of cutting-edge security features, in circulation in October, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday. The new $100 bill was supposed to have entered circulation in February 2011. But the release was delayed by production problems, notably creasing of the paper during printing. The Fed said the redesigned bill will begin circulating on October 8.

British finance minister George Osborne warned Tuesday that an independent Scotland would sacrifice control over much of its economy if it stayed in a currency zone using the pound. Launching a Treasury paper on currency options ahead of a September 2014 referendum, Osborne said there was also no guarantee the rest of the United Kingdom would accept such an arrangement. Osborne told an audience in Glasgow that Scotland could otherwise end up like Panama and Montenegro, which use the US dollar and the euro respectively but with no control over policy.

TOKYO (Reuters) - It is too difficult to predict when the Bank of Japan will meet its 2 percent inflation goal, a senior economist from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said on Tuesday. It would be acceptable if it took three years for the BOJ to meet its goal, and it is important for the BOJ to continue its quantitative easing until its price goal is met, Randall Jones said. The BOJ agreed earlier this month to double the monetary base to meet its 2 percent inflation target over the next two years.