ECB’s Nagel: We’ll Wait for the Numbers and Then Decide, as Agreed in July

28 August 2023

By David Barwick – ALPBACH, Austria (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Joachim Nagel on Monday said that monetary authorities would await all incoming data before reaching a monetary policy decision next month.

During a panel discussion at the European Forum Alpbach, Nagel, who heads the German Bundesbank, said, ‘So, we will see what we have to do in September. I will not give any signals here what we will do in September. … We will wait for the numbers, this is what we agreed in our last July meeting, then we will see what is necessary in our September meeting.’

Referring to the July monetary policy meeting, at which the ECB decided to set the remuneration of minimum reserves at 0%, Nagel said, ‘And I guess this was a good move, and yes, maybe we could do more on that front.’

The euro area would manage ‘a kind of a soft landing, and then we will achieve better numbers next year in 2024’, he said. As for German performance, the weakness of the second quarter, and potentially of the third, was no great surprise, he said, ‘but as I said, there is a lot of light at the end of the tunnel.’