ECB Governing Council member Martins Kazaks said in a Reuters interview that a July rate hike “would imply an extremely and unlikely quick pace of tapering”. Overall, “at the current juncture, naming a specific month would be much premature.”
“If we see that inflation remains high and the labor market remains strong or strengthens further, if we see that the economy keeps going, the direction is clear: we may act sooner than we assumed in the past,” he added.
Over the weekend, another Governing Council member Klass Knot said, “personally I expect our first rate increase to take place around the fourth quarter of this year…. Normally we would raise rates by a quarter percentage point, I have no reason to expect we would take a different step.”
