As others try to quash rate cut talk, European Central Bank’s Centeno flags inflation progress

Euro zone inflation is moving in the right direction, Portugal’s central bank governor Mario Centeno said Tuesday, despite his peers on the European Central Bank Governing Council striking a more hawkish tone in recent days.

“We target medium term inflation, we don’t target February inflation, and the trajectory is very positive right now,” Centeno told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“I don’t say that overshooting is a possibility, but we don’t need to do more than is needed to bring inflation in the medium term to 2%. Since the end of 2022, all our forecasts to 2025 show a very well-anchored forecast for inflation in the medium term.”

“We remain data dependent, that’s how we frame our decisions … One of the greatest successes of the ECB lately is being able to anchor expectations for inflation in the medium term at 2%, and this is because we are credible, we have to remain so,” Centeno said.

The pressures on inflation have become domestic, with most of the shocks that sparked the sharp rise in inflation to 10.6% in October 2022 having subsided, he added.

It comes a day after Austrian central bank governor and ECB member Robert Holzmann said that data in recent weeks had pointed in the “opposite direction” than would usually spur talk of cutting interest rates. He also said it was possible there would be no cuts this year, contrary to market expectations.

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