European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said the ECB was likely to miss its 2 per cent inflation target more often in the future as policymakers are forced to wrestle with “exceptionally high” uncertainty.
A week after the central bank signalled a possible slowdown in cuts to borrowing costs after reducing its benchmark interest rate for the sixth time by a quarter point to 2.5 per cent, Lagarde warned that the environment had become so difficult that it would be “impossible” to guarantee that “headline inflation will always be at 2 per cent”.
The goal of the ECB would be to ensure that “inflation is always converging back towards 2 per cent over the medium term”, she told a conference on Wednesday.