Commerzbank: ECB’s Kazāks and Šimkus Surest Predictors of Rate Moves

2 October 2025

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Germany’s Commerzbank on Thursday published an AI-supported analysis of 17 European Central Bank Governing Council members that found Mārtiņš Kazāks and Gediminas Šimkus to be the members who most reliably signal the evolution of euro area monetary policy.

According to the bank in a research note, Kazāks, who heads Latvijas Banka and took the number one spot in the ranking, stood out by virtue of economic and inflation assessments consistently “similar to that of the entire Council at the next meeting.”

“As a result, he often drew the right conclusions with regard to interest rate decisions.” Commerzbank commented.

Šimkus, governor of the Bank of Lithuania and number two in the ranking, “also frequently makes accurate predictions about the ECB's actual monetary policy,” said the financial institution, though it noted that Šimkus’ limited visibility in 2022 raised questions about the robustness of this result.

The two Baltic Council members were closely followed by Bank of Finland Governor Olli Rehn and Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau, in that order.

Of the 17 Council members studied (those without sufficient track records were omitted), the rest visibly lagged the top four, with Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel ranking highest among them.

In the last two years or so, Nagel has stuck to “very vague statements on interest rate policy – for example, emphasizing the openness or data dependency of monetary policy decisions – so that, according to our AI model, his comments do not indicate a clear direction for interest rates,” Commerzbank said.

The highest-ranked Executive Board member was Chief Economist Philip Lane in ninth place, with Isabel Schnabel clearly assessed as a less reliable predictor of where interest rates are headed, though still better than ECB President Christine Lagarde.

The ranking, Commerzbank made clear, was affected by monetary authorities’ willingness to offer guidance pertaining to interest rates, so that a given member’s preference in public comments for other topics besides current monetary policy led to a lower ranking of the member’s predictive reliability.

“It is possible that [Executive Board members] Christine Lagarde, Luis de Guindos, Piero Cipollone, Isabel Schnabel, Philip Lane, and Frank Elderson feel obliged in their capacity as ECB directors not to express opinions in advance and influence market expectations,” the bank explained. “In addition, Cipollone and Elderson mainly focus on other topics such as green monetary policy or the digital euro and comment less on current monetary policy.”