ECB President Christine Lagarde reiterated the plan to hike by another 50bps at March meeting. She added, “What comes after that will be data dependent. We will look at all numbers — inflation, obviously, labor cost, projections and we will determine what our monetary-policy path will be after that.”
“It is quite normal that we see at the moment inflation catchup as a key theme of negotiations between unions and employers associations,” she said. “At this point in time, for the whole of the euro area, we don’t see this spiraling of inflation-wages, inflation-wages.”