In an interview with El País, ECB chief economic Philip Lane said “we don’t think the recovery process is over”, and “growth will be pretty strong in 2022”. Tourist season will be “better next year” and bottlenecks “ultimately will be resolved.” Also, other factors include savings accumulated during the pandemic, the Next Generation EU fund, and the high vaccination rates.
The headaches about bottlenecks and higher energy prices are “not going to wipe out the underlying momentum of the recovery”. He added, “it is not only about getting back to where we were before the pandemic – it’s also about catching up to the growth that we should have had in 2020 and 2021. So there is still a lot of momentum in the system.”
“Inflation is unexpectedly high at the moment, but we do think it is going to fall next year,” he said. “we did talk about ‘inflation, inflation, inflation’, but this period of inflation is very unusual and temporary, and not a sign of a chronic situation. The situation we are in now is very different from the 1970s and 1980s.”
