ECB President Lagarde: Cannot guarantee action in December, but current developments remain consistent with expectations.

When asked about someone pointing out that the ECB was slow to respond to the energy shock and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, ECB President Lagarde said this is not a problem unique to Europe but one facing all of us. Asked further about the lessons learned from this episode and whether she believed it was necessary to raise interest rates before any secondary effects emerged, Lagarde said: I think what we have recently experienced and are still experiencing is enormous uncertainty, unpredictability, the dismantling of the world order as we knew it, trade disruptions, supply chain disruptions, and an excessive focus on security rather than efficiencyall of these are fundamentally changing the operating environment for economic actors. That is precisely why we decided to set monetary policy based on data and meeting by meeting. So I cannot guarantee today that we will necessarily act in December. But what I can say for sure is that, based on the information we currently have, unless there is a major change, developments will not diverge from my expectations. That is also what I said at the press conference.