ECB’s de Cos: We Will Deliver on Our Price Stability Mandate

16 November 2022

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The European Central Bank will deliver on its price stability mandate, Governing Council member Pablo Hernández de Cos said Wednesday.

In an interview with Spanish national daily ABC, de Cos, who heads Banco de España, said that preventing high inflation from becoming persistent and ultimately taking a toll on growth by depressing real incomes ‘is the fundamental reason why monetary policy has initiated, and more recently accelerated, a process of interest rate normalisation.’

‘The public should not doubt the European Central Bank's willingness and ability to bring inflation rates back to our 2% target in the medium term’, he continued. ‘Price stability is the mandate given to us by the citizens and we will deliver on it.’

De Cos reminded that globalisation had brought important positive economic effects. ‘The trade-off is, obviously, that it makes us more vulnerable to an increasingly complex environment’, he said, which is why considerations of security and autonomy have supplanted the quest for efficiency.

‘This explains why the EU has launched an ambitious agenda to increase strategic independence’, he continued. ‘The key, and also the difficulty, lies in how to achieve these new objectives while retaining the essential advantages of globalisation.’