ECB’s Kocher: Some Recent Data “Have Turned Slightly to the Better”

31 October 2025

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Martin Kocher on Friday said that developments since the ECB’s September monetary policy decision had “slightly” improved.

“The uncertainty is still very high, so this is of course influencing the assessment of the overall situation,” Kocher, who heads the Austrian National Bank (OeNB), told Bloomberg. “But it’s true that if anything, some of the data that we have been getting since the last monetary policy meeting in September have turned to the slightly better.”

The latest GDP data had been “slightly better” and in terms of inflation, “we are at target,” he said.

“So, given that nothing changed compared to the last meeting, the assessment was that the three main policy rates are appropriate,” he said. “We continue to stay in a good place and we left it where they are, actually.”

This does “not at all” mean that the bar for a December cut is higher, he said. “It’s clear that we have a meeting-by-meeting approach. We know that the uncertainty is high. It depends a bit on the shift of risks, but also of course whether some of the risks that we all know about … manifest themselves or not.”

The data-dependent approach was appropriate under the prevailing uncertainty, he said.

“It’s clear that things might change,” he said. “It’s clear that there’s no .. pre-commitment on any rate path.”

The unwillingness to pre-commit implied that neither a hike nor a cut as the next move could be assigned a relatively probability, it all coming down to the data, he said. Still, he said, “we are at the end or very close to the end of the monetary cycle.”

The ECB’s current projections suggested that inflation should stay near target for as long as “years,” he said.

“To be honest, the 2028 projection is of course a projection that is far out in the future,” he said. “So, putting too much weight on this projection, on this single data point, I think would not be appropriate. It’s more about the less uncertainty that we have about 2026 and 2027.”

Risks to inflation were “quite balanced,” he said.