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ECB’s Lane: “We Are Trying to Be as Open-Minded as Possible”

16 October 2025

ECB’s Lane: “We Are Trying to Be as Open-Minded as Possible”
Philip Lane, chief economist of the European Central Bank, at the 5th Joint BoC - ECB - NY Fed Conference in Frankfurt on October 2, 2024. Photo by Bernd Roselieb for ECB under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

By Marta Vilar – WASHINGTON (Econostream) – European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane said on Thursday that the ECB was trying to be fully flexible in its moves and would stick to its meeting-by-meeting approach.

In a panel at the Institute of International Finance Annual Meeting in Washington DC, Lane said that the ECB was “trying to be as open-minded as possible and go meeting by meeting.”

The ECB’s data-dependence should be understood as forward-looking rather than as a narrow focus on the current path of inflation, he said.

Uncertainty was now anchored given the recent trade agreements, he said, noting that the current situation was “not a right-out fragmentation scenario.”

“There are changes, but it's not of the scale that you have to question how does the world economy operate,” he said.

The ECB was now in a position in which it had to manage “contained cyclical fluctuations” with respect to the inflation target but should be ready to act if it had to “change gear.”

“If something dramatic happens, we have to react,” he said.

 

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