The Federal Reserve won’t help the U.S. labor market by purchasing debt securities, but the move would likely prompt similar action by other central banks, one of this year’s Nobel laureates in economics said Friday.

“Quantitative easing is not going to do anything for employment because there is already lots of liquidity” in the U.S. economy, Christopher Pissarides said. “If the Fed does do QE, then I hope the Bank of England will follow, and others too,” he said.

“If the Fed does QE, then Trichet will do it plus 12%,” said Pissarides, who earlier Friday had given a speech at Rome’s Luiss University.

The European Central Bank, headed by Jean-Claude Trichet, has engaged in large-scale liquidity support of European banks but only very modest purchases of covered bonds. The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have both purchased larges swathes of government and agency debt, and the Bank of Japan has begun following suit.

Pissarides blamed the U.S. problems on “fiscal indiscipline.” The U.S. doesn’t have the sovereign risk that euro-zone countries have, and it also has Chinese and Japanese monetary authorities buying the dollar, he said. “I don’t want the U.S. dollar to depreciate because it is Europe that bears the cost of this,” he said.

But there is no Nobel consensus on unconventional monetary policy or the destiny of the U.S. dollar. Ed Phelps, winner of the 2006 prize, said he disagrees entirely with Pissarides.

“The U.S. should be allowed to let the dollar weaken as ultimately everyone benefits, the U.S. thanks to exports, while all the others then benefit from the innovation that results from this,” said Phelps, who also gave a speech.

“The U.S. economy has become very weak in the past decade,” Phelps said. “Innovation will get going only if exports get going, and that’s the only way to get employment going.”