ECB’s Lagarde says Europe is getting more resilient to economic shocks

[SINTRA, Portugal] Europe is becoming less vulnerable to outside shocks thanks to a better financial framework and progress on the green transition, Christine Lagarde said. 

Better banking and fiscal regulations as well as investments in low-carbon energy have paid off recently, the European Central Bank president said in a speech opening her institution’s annual retreat in Sintra, Portugal. 

Lagarde cited how the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank didn’t destabilise any eurozone lenders, how the region took US President Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught in its stride, and how more recently it has withstood arguably the biggest oil-supply disruption in history.

“While we are more likely to face shocks that push inflation away from target, the resilience Europe has built means their effects on our economy are more contained,” she said on Monday (Jun 29). “We may therefore more often find ourselves in an intermediate zone, between shocks we can look through and those we must react to forcefully.”

ECB officials are convening in the Portuguese hillside resort weeks after they raised interest rates to contain price pressures triggered by the conflict in the Middle East. 

As tensions subside amid a peace deal – whose durability Lagarde described as “far from assured” – policymakers must decide whether further monetary tightening is needed.

While oil prices have retreated since the ECB’s hike, officials including executive board member Isabel Schnabel argue that, as things stand, borrowing costs probably still need to rise further. 

Lagarde reiterated that the move in June was a “robust decision” and that “nothing we have observed since then has called this assessment into question”. She added that it wasn’t accurate to describe it as an “insurance hike”. 

Instead, she lauded the ECB’s progress on understanding how real-time data affect medium-term inflation, as well as improvements in the quarterly projections that often proved wrong during the consumer-price spike in 2022. 

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June’s rate increase “was a decision based on what we saw in front of us”, Lagarde noted. “Our ability to take it with confidence, in an environment of considerable uncertainty, is the product of years of investment in our data, our indicators and our projections.”

Lagarde spoke in the same week that a eurozone inflation report is set to show probably the first slowdown since the Iran war began. Analysts think consumer prices rose 3 per cent in June, down from 3.2 per cent the previous month. 

Some have pared expectations for future rate increases as energy prices retreat. Oxford Economics and Capital Economics are among those saying the ECB won’t raise further, though investors are still pricing one more quarter-point move, which would bring the deposit rate to 2.5 per cent.

The president highlighted that the ECB’s reaction function is now “well understood” by markets as they adjust financial conditions in response to new data on their own.

“Monetary policy begins to take effect before we have made a decision,” she added. “That buys us time to assess how a shock is developing before we commit to a course of action, which is highly valuable in conditions of high uncertainty.” BLOOMBERG