ECB’s Lagarde: Europe Should Have a ‘Strong Hand’ if Negotiations Are Unsuccessful

18 May 2025

ECB’s Lagarde: Europe Should Have a ‘Strong Hand’ if Negotiations Are Unsuccessful
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, in the Girls’ IT Bootcamp in Frankfurt on April 24 and 25, 2024. Photo by the ECB under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Sunday that Europe should be ready to react strongly to US tariffs if negotiations turn out to be unsuccessful.

In an interview with French weekly La Tribune Dimanche, Lagarde said that Europe ‘needs to have a strong hand should negotiations prove unsuccessful.’

Europe needed to have identified adequate retaliatory measures in terms of the sectors and regions to target and the amounts and percentages in which they will be targeted, according to Lagarde.

‘From a business perspective, it has to negotiate, consider the room for manoeuvre, understand what the other side wants and see whether an agreement can be reached’, she said.

Lagarde described the recent strengthening of the euro vs the US dollar as ‘impressive’ given that the usual reaction would have been the opposite.

 ‘It [the strengthening of the euro] is counter-intuitive but can be explained by the level of uncertainty and the fact that some parts of the financial markets are losing confidence in US policies’, she said.

 

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