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ECB’s Lagarde: My Suspicion is We Might Revise Growth Up Again in December

10 December 2025

ECB’s Lagarde: My Suspicion is We Might Revise Growth Up Again in December
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, at the ECB Governing Council press conference on March 6, 2025. Photo by Angela Morant/ECB under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Wednesday that she expects another upward revision to growth forecasts at the Governing Council’s December meeting.

In an interview at the FT The Global Boardroom in London, Lagarde said that “with a track record of around 2% inflation and a medium-term projection at 2%, I would say again that we are in a good place.”

The euro area economy was doing better than expected and was now “more resilient”, with growth “resisting,” she said. Lagarde added that the ECB had been revising growth projections up in previous projection exercises and said that her “suspicion is that we might do that again in December.”

Growth had held up more strongly than expected since the U.S. tariff announcement back in April, she continued, and tariffs had failed to deliver the blow many had feared.

“Europe has resisted, there was no retaliation on tariffs, the euro did not depreciate as we could have anticipated, and I think that when we look at the composite numbers, surveys of manufacturers’ intentions, whether we look at employment numbers record low, whether we look at employment participation record high… the whole economy is faring better,” she said.

Lagarde questioned whether this was sufficient, noting that growth was “quite close to potential”, and said that further improvement would hinge on productivity and longer-term structural issues.

Asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a possible change to the ECB’s mandate, she argued that lowering interest rates to “rock bottom” or implementing “massive QE” would not in itself improve the movement of goods or delivery of services across member states.

Still, she said that discussing a treaty change would be “interesting” and “a good debate”, emphasising that even under its current price-stability mandate, the ECB already takes into account factors such as growth, employment, innovation and climate change.