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ECB’s Lagarde: Meeting-by-Meeting Approach “Serves Us Well” Amid Uncertainty

9 February 2026

ECB’s Lagarde: Meeting-by-Meeting Approach “Serves Us Well” Amid Uncertainty
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, at the ECB Governing Council meeting in Frankfurt on December 18, 2025. Photo by the ECB under CC BY-ND-NC 2.0.

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on Monday told the European Parliament that policymakers will stick with a data-dependent, meeting-by-meeting approach as global uncertainty remains high.

A plenary debate in Strasbourg focused on the ECB’s Annual Report and a draft parliamentary resolution that, Lagarde said, underscored the importance of central bank independence while reinforcing the accountability that comes with it. “Independence does not mean isolation,” she said.

On monetary policy, Lagarde said last Thursday’s decision to keep rates unchanged reflected an updated assessment that continued to point to inflation stabilizing at the 2% target in the medium term. “In the current uncertain environment, our data-dependent, meeting-by-meeting approach to monetary policy serves us well,” she said.

Payments policy was the other main pillar of her remarks, with Lagarde backing legislative work to safeguard cash use while arguing that cash needs a digital counterpart. “We therefore need to complement physical cash with its digital equivalent, a digital euro,” she said, adding that the digital euro would be accepted for digital payments throughout the euro area, allow offline use with “cash-like privacy,” and be built on a “fully European infrastructure.”

She also said the ECB aims to make tokenized central bank money available to support a European digital-assets ecosystem, with Project Pontes expected to deliver a solution for settling DLT-based wholesale transactions in the third quarter, and Project Appia aimed at fostering integrated European market infrastructures from the outset.

Beyond the ECB’s remit, Lagarde urged lawmakers to accelerate reforms she described as central to resilience and competitiveness, including progress on a savings and investments union, steps to deepen market integration and supervision, and measures to reduce fragmentation in the Single Market, including a proposed 28th regime.