By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Tuesday that the ECB had so far observed little evidence of Chinese goods being redirected in large quantities to Europe, though she stressed that the situation would be monitored closely.
In a Q&A session at the 4th Bank of Finland’s International Monetary Policy Conference in Helsinki, Lagarde said that the ECB was “monitoring the evolution of imports, the evolution of exports, the risk of rerouting, the risk of redirecting…” when asked about potential rerouting of Chinese goods due to trade developments.
“All of that matters a lot,” she said about the ways in which trade rerouting could affect inflation.
To date, there hadn’t been too much redirecting of Chinese trade to Europe due to tariffs: “We haven’t seen much of that, but we have to monitor,” she said. “So far, it is not what we had instantly feared.”
There had been limited rerouting, but a major change in trade patterns can “take quite a while,” she noted.
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