ECB’s de Guindos: ‘Today It Is Very Difficult to Say What We Will Do in April’

27 March 2025

By Marta Vilar – BRUSSELS (Econostream) – European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos said on Thursday that it was very hard to predict the outcome of the April meeting.

In a panel discussion at the IIF European Summit 2025, de Guindos said that in April the ECB ‘will see the data, we will see how the different elements are evolving.’

De Guindos hoped that there would be more clarity about specific US tariffs by then, which would help the ECB reach a decision.

‘But today it is very difficult to say what we will do in April’, he said.

The ECB was ‘optimistic’ about services inflation and believed inflation would return to the 2% target in the coming quarters, according to de Guindos.

‘If you look at the evolution of wages and compensation for employee, we believe that services inflation will start to decelerate as well’, he said.

The outlook for growth was less optimistic, he said.

A trade war would have a short-term effect on inflation, while the impact on growth ‘would be extremely detrimental’, he said.

‘So, in the medium-term the reduction in growth would offset the initial increase in inflation produced by the introduction of tariffs’, he argued.

This was reflected in the ECB’s March projections, but not fully, as uncertainty was very high, he said.

‘The risks are clearly tilted to the downside even after the downgrade in our last round of projections’, he said.

Asked if the ECB had to be more pre-emptive and dovish given the expected economic hit from the potential trade war, or instead should maintain the data-dependent approach, de Guindos said that there was no ‘incompatibility’ between the two.

‘When you are in a very dark room with a lot of uncertainty you have to take steps with a lot of care and you have to very prudent, and that’s what we are doing’, he said.