ECB’s Stournaras: ‘Maybe the Time Has Come’ to Remove Restrictiveness From Statement

21 November 2024

ECB’s Stournaras: ‘Maybe the Time Has Come’ to Remove Restrictiveness From Statement
Yannis Stournaras, governor of the Bank of Greece, at the European Central Bank Governing Council meeting in Athens on October 26, 2023. Photo by Adrian Petty/ECB.

By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Yannis Stournaras said on Thursday that it could be time to think about removing from the ECB's Monetary Policy Statement the reference to interest rates being set at a ‘sufficiently restrictive’ level.

In another interview with Bloomberg TV, Stournaras, who heads the Bank of Greece, said that ‘maybe the time has come’ to consider deleting this sentence, although the ECB was still ‘in quite restrictive territory’.

‘It’s very premature to say now whether we should go to an expansive territory’, he said.

Asked if the risks of undershooting the ECB's inflation target were now bigger than those of overshooting, Stournaras said that the balance of risks was now neutral.

Inflation was going to hit the ECB's 2% target in a sustainable way ‘much earlier than thought in the September forecast’, he said, probably around the end of Q1 2025.