The aim of this paper is to investigate a range of financial techniques and policy strategies for a Quantitative Easing (QE) program by the European Central Bank (ECB) that would rely on Euro area government bonds purchases under various modalities and guises. In particular, we provide an empirical study of different possible QE arrangements, with a special focus on a proposal of a securitization structure that could clear the different sovereign bonds from credit risk and heterogenerity. The securitization framework proposal is compared with a program of Euro-area public debt direct purchases under two alternative scenarios of: i) pari-passu creditor status of the ECB with respect to private investors; ii) preferred creditor status of the ECB. We consider three cases of “un-managed” (fixed composition) direct purchases according to which member states bonds are purchased in proportion to: i) the “capital key” representing equity holdings of ECB’s shares; ii) a “liquidity-key” representing the relative amount of sovereign bonds outstanding; iii) an equally-weighted portfolio of sovereign bonds. We evaluate the impact of various SPV characteristics - such as bond tranche attachment choice - as well as various financial market scenarios. For these choices we provide a risk management analytical framework based on Monte Carlo simulations. This allows us to compute the probability distribution of credit losses under various credit spreads and default correlation scenarios as well as to design appropriate stress testing procedures to gauge the robustness of our proposed GBB QE solutions. In this version of the paper our modelling strategy relies on the Gaussian copula assumption in default risk correlation. [...]