By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – As expected, the European Central Bank did not raise rates on Thursday, but it did not use the announcement of its rate decision to make the hold sound comfortable.
30 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The European Central Bank’s quiet period is intended to steady market expectations about monetary policy decisions by prohibiting communication in the seven days before a Governing Council meeting. In the current environment, it has the opposite effect, and that is just one of its drawbacks.
30 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The European Central Bank does not need to feel obliged by markets on Thursday into explicitly validating June rate hike expectations, let alone a 50bp move. But after the latest inflation expectations data and Tuesday’s market reaction, a dovish tone from ECB President Christine Lagarde would fit the moment poorly, even if sounding overly hawkish would also carry risks.
29 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Over the last month, the European Central Bank has laid the groundwork for a hold at this week’s Governing Council monetary policy meeting. If the three key last-minute data points—namely euro area GDP and inflation as well as the ECB’s corporate telephone survey—do not deliver a major surprise, then a unanimous hold on Thursday still looks like the most likely outcome.
28 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The European Central Bank’s latest Consumer Expectations Survey makes a hold by the Governing Council on Thursday a harder sell, but does not make a rate hike unavoidable.
28 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The European Central Bank’s latest SAFE survey, just released, does not compel a rate hike on Thursday but does make a relaxed hold harder to justify.
27 April 2026
By David Barwick and Marta Vilar – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The European Central Bank did not abruptly take an April 30 rate hike off the table. Instead, starting in late March and gathering pace by mid-April, policymakers increasingly stopped preparing markets for action at the next meeting and started buying time. April remained formally live, but messaging pointed more and more clearly toward June as the meeting at which the Governing Council expected to know enough to judge whether the Iran shock was merely painful or genuinely inflationary in the medium term.
22 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde’s speech in Berlin on Monday fit neatly into the pattern of recent ECB communication. Patient but not complacent, it was above all an effort to explain why the ECB still does not know enough to draw robust near-term policy conclusions.
21 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – OMFIF’s new survey on who should succeed European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde is interesting chiefly as a snapshot of elite chatter, because it treats the ECB presidency as if the position were being filled by a search committee weighing CVs against a competency matrix.
20 April 2026
By David Barwick and Marta Vilar – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – We return from the IMF Spring Meetings in Washington yet more convinced that treating a June hike as the inevitable byproduct of an April hold understates the risk that June, too, will prove too early.
20 April 2026
By David Barwick – WASHINGTON (Econostream) – With April increasingly looking like a meeting the European Central Bank’s Governing Council is keeping alive out of convention rather than conviction, June now risks being treated as the move that inevitably follows. That may be too simplistic.
16 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – We argued on March 27 that European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel had given the Governing Council “room to wait.” On April 1 we said April 30 still looked live, but that it sounded “less and less like the ECB is trying to lead markets there,” a point we sharpened further on April 7 and April 8 . President Christine Lagarde’s Bloomberg TV interview on Tuesday strongly reinforces that line.
14 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Our Insights on April 7 , April 1 and March 27 argued that recent European Central Bank Governing Council communication had increasingly come to sound like that of a body dutifully keeping April 30 live while sounding reluctant to move then. Bank of Slovenia Governor Primož Dolenc’s podcast comments on Wednesday reinforce that impression — despite almost certainly having been recorded before the overnight ceasefire between the United States and Iran.
8 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – It’s easy to picture some of those listening to European Central Bank Governing Council member François Villeroy de Galhau’s speech last Thursday doing a double-take on hearing him say that the next change in ECB interest rates was probably destined to be a hike.
7 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The Insight we published on April 1 argued that European Central Bank Governing Council communication had lately grown distinctly more tentative. Austrian National Bank Governor Martin Kocher’s Politico interview on April 2 lets us make the point more plainly: as things stand today, the burden of proof at the April meeting lies with a hike, not a hold.
7 April 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Since the European Central Bank’s March 19 meeting, Governing Council members have plainly worked to keep April 30 live. So much is clear. Less clear is whether policymakers are doing much to prepare the ground for such a move.
1 April 2026
By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – Fabio Panetta, usually one of the European Central Bank Governing Council’s more dovish voices (see our Hawk-Dove ranking ), on Tuesday gave his first comments on the Middle East conflict in terms that were less dovish than those of some peers, even if he still stopped well short of backing hikes.
31 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – François Villeroy de Galhau’s early departure from the presidency of the Banque de France, though mainly a domestic story, is also an early test of how French President Emmanuel Macron wants to allocate national monetary policy talent ahead of the next round of European Central Bank Executive Board openings.
31 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel on Friday evening made a clear case for patience without remotely taking tightening off the table. Her core message was that the ECB should not let the memory of 2022 stampede it into treating every supply-side shock as the inevitable start of another inflation spiral, especially when the starting conditions—think today—are materially different.
27 March 2026
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Less than a week after the European Central Bank left rates unchanged and Christine Lagarde stressed uncertainty, the ECB president on Wednesday sounded somewhat more hawkish.
25 March 2026