Tassi and the ECB, Visco’s warning: “No to colleagues’ statements on prolonged increases”

«The uncertainty is so high that as the Governing Council of the ECB we have agreed to decide ‘meeting by meeting’, without the forward guidance’ that we had followed so far. I therefore do not appreciate statements by my colleagues about future and prolonged rate hikes. This was stated by the governor of Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, speaking at the fourteenth Maeci-Bank of Italy Conference, “The necessary transition: the future of energy, between geopolitics and sustainable growth”. «’I don’t know, we don’t know enough. For this I can only say, recalling Eugenio Montale, “what we are not, what we don’t want”, in this case we don’t want high and persistent inflation».

According to the issue of Palazzo Koch, «even if monetary policy has so far been successful in stabilizing expectations, the serious geopolitical situation makes it very difficult to predict future macroeconomic trends. Monetary policy will therefore have to continue to move with prudence, being guided by the data that gradually become available, in order to bring inflation back to the 2 per cent objective over the medium term, without jeopardizing financial stability and minimizing the negative effects on the still fragile recovery».