European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel said there’s been little effect to date from an unprecedented bout of monetary-policy tightening aimed at taming inflation.
(Bloomberg) — European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel said there’s been little effect to date from an unprecedented bout of monetary-policy tightening aimed at taming inflation.
The growth in consumer prices still has momentum, with the level of underlying inflation extraordinarily high, Schnabel told a webcast on Tuesday. The recent slowdown in the headline number isn’t down to ECB policy, she said.
“You can’t say that monetary policy is having such an impact that we can hope for inflation to reach our 2% target in the medium term,” Schnabel said. “We’ll closely look at what’s happening on labor markets, what’s happening to investments, how the economy develops overall.”
While raising interest rates by a half-point last week, the ECB all but promised an identical move when it next meets in March. Some of its more hawkish officials have since said hikes will likely need to persist in the months that follow, setting their sights on sticky core inflation.
“We have to ask ourselves is for how long we need to stay in restrictive territory,” Schnabel said. “It’ll depend on whether we have robust evidence that inflation, and especially underlying inflation, is converging back to our 2% target and stabilizes there.”
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