FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The European Central Bank’s next strategy assessment will not involve some key issues, including a discussion on the bank’s numerical inflation target or the publication of interest rate forecasts, ECB President Christine Lagarde said on Thursday.
The ECB announced the 2025 exercise when it concluded the last major review in 2021 but Lagarde made clear on Thursday that this will be more an interim assessment of the ongoing strategy and not another overarching review.
“We have deliberately excluded any discussion concerning the symmetric 2% medium term (target), so the inflation target will not be debated,” Lagarde said.
“It can be debated, you know, in the future by a future president of the ECB but not on my watch,” she added.
The ECB targets inflation at 2% but some economists and policymakers have suggested it needed to be more tolerant of deviations, particularly when inflation undershoots its target.
Lagarde also said the ECB will not debate adapting a so-called dot plot, a tool used by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Fed policymakers make individual interest rate projections which are then represented as dots in a graph and indicate to market participants where rates may be heading.
“The other item that also we will exclude is the discussion of the dot plots, given the experience that some of my colleagues have had of this element,” Lagarde said.
ECB board member Isabel Schnabel of Germany earlier this year floated the idea of publishing a dot plot of policymakers’ projections, arguing it would better inform markets.
Lagarde said the strategy assessment will start relatively soon and end in the second half of 2025.
(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Catherine Evans)
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