ECB President Christine Lagarde said in a Bloomberg TV interview, “we have exceptional circumstances to deal with at the moment and we have exceptional tools to use at the moment, and a battery of those. We will use them as and when needed in order to deliver on our mandate and deliver on our pledge to the economy.”
“Given the exceptional situation that we are facing we are using maximum flexibility” with the EUR 1.85T PEPP purchases program, she added. The March 2022 deadline of the program was not “set in stone”, and policy makers will give “sufficient early notice to avoid the anxiety, the tantrum, or any of those movements” that have happened in the past.
Overall, Lagarde said, “we have an economic situation overall which in this part of the world, Europe, is really marked by uncertainty. What monetary policy has to do and what the ECB has to do is to provide as much certainty as possible.”
