By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Martin Kocher said Tuesday that policymakers were watching closely for second-round effects from the recent energy shock, saying these were what mattered for the medium-term inflation path and stressing that the goal remained to return inflation to 2%.
24 March 2026
By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) - After the Iran conflict erupted on February 28, markets moved quickly to reprice the outlook for rates, increasingly factoring in ECB hikes. Our ECB Tone Meter , however, told a different story, remaining broadly neutral and only edging higher after the Governing Council meeting on March 19.
24 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Mārtiņš Kazāks on Tuesday said the ECB would raise interest rates if the latest energy shock began feeding through into broader inflation, while declining to rule out action as soon as next month.
24 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – In his first substantive public intervention since being confirmed as the next ECB vice president, Croatian National Bank Governor Boris Vujčić did not merely keep April alive. He leaned distinctly hawkish, normalized the idea of more than one rate hike, and suggested that the euro area may already be drifting away from the European Central Bank’s baseline and toward something closer to the ECB’s severe scenario only days after the scenario analysis was unveiled.
24 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Boris Vujčić on Tuesday said the ECB had to remain “very agile and vigilant” as the Iran war pushed the euro area closer to stagflation risk, while making clear that policymakers would soon know whether higher interest rates were needed.
24 March 2026
By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Dimitar Radev said on Monday that the ECB stands ready to “act decisively” while remaining “measured,” noting that there are already “some indications” of second-round effects stemming from the surge in energy prices linked to the Middle East conflict.
23 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane on Monday said artificial intelligence could eventually reshape productivity, investment, employment and the natural rate of interest in the euro area, but that its monetary-policy implications remained too uncertain to support any mechanical conclusion.
23 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Executive Board member Piero Cipollone on Monday said Europe would need tokenized central bank money, closer public-private cooperation and a stronger legal framework if it wanted to scale tokenized financial markets and turn an early lead into lasting advantage.
23 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Peter Kažimír said Monday that future policy decisions would depend crucially on how the situation in the Middle East evolved, warning that the war in Iran posed a clear risk of higher inflation and slower economic growth.
23 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos’ interview with Spanish daily El Mundo on Monday was no overt attempt to prepare markets for an April rate hike, given how closely he hewed to the meeting-by-meeting, data-dependent line. And yet, the interview does nothing to make such a decision look less conceivable.
23 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos said Monday that the war in the Middle East would have a strong impact on euro-area growth and inflation, while stressing that the ECB did not expect the shock to trigger a recession.
23 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – One day after European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde’s press conference, the flow of follow-up comments has not produced a clear consensus for action at the April 30 meeting. But it has made it clearer that a hike is a very live contingency.
20 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Joachim Nagel said Friday that the Iran war had sharply raised inflation uncertainty via energy prices and required policymakers to remain “very vigilant,” while judging the Governing Council’s decision a day earlier to leave rates unchanged as appropriate for now.
20 March 2026
By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – Econostream’s ECB Tone Meter showed a notable hawkish shift in the Governing Council this week, with only a minimal shift in the same direction from the Executive Board.
20 March 2026
By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Mārtiņš Kazāks said on Friday that the ECB would avoid rushing into policy decisions and would instead assess possible monetary policy changes in upcoming meetings, beginning in April.
20 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – A month ago, we suggested that European Central Bank Governing Council member François Villeroy de Galhau’s relentless inflation-risk rhetoric could be teeing up a call for a rate cut. Alas, his latest intervention confirms it was no joke.
20 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Gabriel Makhlouf denies the ECB has a tightening bias. Almost everything else about his Bloomberg interview on Friday belied that claim.
20 March 2026
By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member François Villeroy de Galhau said on Friday that a rate cut scenario could not be ruled out, though he added that it was “obviously much less likely” under current conditions.
20 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Gabriel Makhlouf on Friday said he could understand why markets were pricing in two rate hikes this year, but stressed that policymakers remained guided by incoming evidence rather than any pre-set course.
20 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Olli Rehn on Friday said the ECB had been right to leave interest rates unchanged, arguing that “any other policy decision at this stage would have been premature” given the extreme uncertainty created by the war in Iran.
20 March 2026