ECB’s de Guindos: Any Discussion of Rate Cuts ‘Clearly Premature’

9 November 2023

By Isabel Teles – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos on Thursday said that the moment had not yet arrived to start discussing a reduction of ECB interest rates.

Asked by Slovenian business daily Finance what data the ECB would need to see to start easing monetary policy, de Guindos replied, ‘We are not there yet. We will see how things evolve month by month, but our approach now is to keep interest rates at this level long enough to reach our target.’

‘Any discussion about lowering interest rates is clearly premature’, he added, echoing ECB President Christine Lagarde following the ECB’s October decision to keep interest rates.

‘[W]e believe that, if interest rates are maintained at their current levels, inflation will continue to fall and converge towards our target’, he said.

Growth this quarter would be very much like that of the last one, producing a stagnant second half, he said. ‘Our most recent projections indicated some downside risks to growth; some of these risks have now started to materialise and this will have an impact on inflation’, he said.

‘It might be premature to say it, but leading indicators point to the growth outlook being somewhat more negative than we previously projected’, he said. ‘As regards inflation, the evolution may not be very different from what we projected in September.’