By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Mārtiņš Kazāks on Wednesday said the urgency of consecutive interest rate increases had decreased significantly and that the ECB did not currently need to respond forcefully to inflation.

Kazāks, who heads Latvijas Banka, told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the ECB’s annual Forum on Central Banking in Sintra, Portugal, that it was too soon to say what the Governing Council would do at its next meetings.

“We’ll see what the data will tell us”, he said. “It’s currently still way too hard to say what we’re going to do in July, let alone September. But the urgency of consecutive moves has decreased significantly.”

“Currently there’s no need to be forceful in our response to inflation”, he said. “The shock was small so far, without risks of nonlinearities and large second-round effects in the labor market.”

Kazāks said the probability of further tightening had not disappeared, but also did not rule out that the June hike could be the ECB’s last in the current sequence.

“If things improve, the probability of not hiking further is not zero”, he said.

He rejected the idea that the June rate hike had been a mistake.

“If somebody interprets this as June having been a potential policy mistake, I don’t think so”, he said, describing the move as a “carefully weighted, robust response to nearly four months of high energy prices.”