By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Gabriel Makhlouf denies the ECB has a tightening bias. Almost everything else about his Bloomberg interview on Friday belied that claim.

The problem may lie in a misconception that “we have no predetermined path” is equivalent to “we have no tightening bias.” The first rules out precommitting to a specific move at a specific meeting. The second concerns the direction in which the near-term policy bias is skewed. Makhlouf invoked the former to deny the latter, but the two are not interchangeable.

The rest of the interview makes that plain. Before the Iran shock, he said, policy had been “basically at neutral,” and he had “not been in the position of really contemplating cuts.”

A policymaker who says cuts were not really under contemplation is not describing a posture of genuine symmetry, even if he still insists in theory that both directions remain possible.

Now the shock has arrived, and hardly anyone would dispute that, at least initially, it chiefly exacerbates upside inflation risks. With much higher energy prices already feeding through to headline inflation, the second-round question has become more important, not less. In that setting, Makhlouf’s denial of a tightening bias becomes harder still to take seriously.

Asked whether he was “comfortable” with current market pricing, he said he could “completely understand” why markets were assuming two hikes this year and a better-than-even chance of a third. True, he did not endorse that path. But neither did he challenge the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, he tied that pricing to the ECB’s determination to deliver 2% inflation in the medium term.

That is already a hawkishly skewed signal. Policymakers do not usually say they “completely understand” a hawkish market path unless they think the logic behind it is broadly sound, even if they are unwilling to validate the exact number of moves.

The same asymmetry appeared in his answer about the April meeting. Asked whether he agreed with Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel that the ECB might need to consider hiking that soon, Makhlouf replied that “if the facts point to us having to take action, we’re going to absolutely take action.” He wrapped that in the usual evidentiary caveats, but the operative thought was unmistakable: if the case is there, the ECB will move.

That is not a genuinely balanced near-term policy posture. A policymaker who sees roughly equal odds of tightening and easing does not answer that question by stressing readiness to act in the hawkish direction while leaving the dovish side almost entirely implicit.

Makhlouf did refuse to say cuts were off the table ‘for good,’ but that changes little. In the middle of a war-driven energy shock, refusing to make a permanent statement about cuts is just basic prudence. It does not mean cuts are a live near-term option in any practical sense. It means only that he does not want to say something obviously foolish and then be trapped by events.

That is the heart of the matter. The hiking side of the near-term policy outlook is concrete, readily articulated, and attached to identifiable triggers. The cutting side survives mainly as a formal possibility, preserved because central bankers avoid absolute statements. What we are left with is asymmetry disguised as optionality.

None of this means April is preordained. Makhlouf was quite correct in noting that six weeks is “a very long time” in the life of this shock. The conflict could de-escalate, energy prices could retrace, and the current market path could look excessive by the time the Governing Council meets again.

But a tightening bias does not mean a hike is certain. It means the distribution of likely policy responses has shifted in one direction. By Makhlouf’s own logic, and even more by his own language, that is exactly what has happened.

The idea of “no predetermined path” remains perfectly valid. It did not, and should not, prevent Makhlouf from revealing that, for now, the hawkish side is plainly more real than the dovish one. In other words, he can claim the ECB has no tightening bias, and one can understand the institutional caution behind it. But the ECB currently has a tightening bias, and so does he.