The European Central Bank must raise interest rates again this month and will base its decision at the following meeting on data, Governing Council Joachim Nagel said.
(Bloomberg) — The European Central Bank must raise interest rates again this month and will base its decision at the following meeting on data, Governing Council Joachim Nagel said.
“We have to hike next time and I expect another 25 basis-point hike for the July meeting,” the Bundesbank president said Monday. “For the September meeting, we will see what the data will tell us.”
Speaking to Bloomberg Television in Gandhinagar, India — where he’s attending a meeting of Group of Twenty finance chiefs — Nagel described underlying inflation as “very sticky.”
“For more or less all the developed countries, core is not coming down like it came down maybe in past cycles,” he said, again referring to inflation as a “greedy beast.”
While markets and economists see hikes both next week and in September, bringing the deposit rate to 4% from 3.5% currently, officials are less clear on the path beyond the summer. Some Governing Council members, including Nagel himself, have said another move shouldn’t be excluded. Others fret about the prospects for the 20-nation euro zone’s economy, which fell into a mild recession in the winter.
Nagel sees no risk of policy being tightened too much, reiterating that a hard landing for Europe is unlikely as rates rise. But he said it’s “too early to really declare a certain kind of a victory when it comes to our inflation fight.”
Core price gains ticked up to 5.4% last month, driven in part by a cheap German transport ticket the year before. While policymakers didn’t see a turning point at their last meeting in June, according to an account last week, some have recently sounded more optimistic.
Most indicators of underlying inflation — which typically exclude volatile items like energy and food — are showing signs of softening, ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos has said. Portuguese central bank head Mario Centeno told Bloomberg this month that the measure will follow the drop in the headline gauge.
For policymakers’ September meeting, new quarterly economic projections will be available, shedding some light on the results of their action so far.
How quickly the 400 basis points of rate increases enacted over the last 12 months will be felt is a key question. While credit has slowed significantly, the effect on companies and households is only now starting to emerge.
“This time maybe we have to be a little bit more patient,” Nagel said. “The pace of the transmission channel is maybe not as fast as it was in the past.”
–With assistance from Andy Clarke.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.