(Bloomberg) -- Cuts could bring European Central Bank interest rates to 2% this summer but beyond that there’s no clarity on direction, according to Governing Council member Francois Villeroy de Galhau.
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“We are the first big, Western central bank to have begun a rate-cutting cycle last year,” the Bank of France chief said in an interview with French magazine Alternatives Economiques. “Seen today, we could be at 2% this coming summer.”
The comments reaffirm Villeroy’s dovish tone and stand in contrast to the tougher stance adopted this week by Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel. She’s urging officials to debate when to pause or cease lowering borrowing costs, saying that with the deposit rate at 2.75%, it’s unclear whether policy is still restrictive.
Villeroy’s assessment is more aligned with that of investors, who are pricing more than 70 basis point cuts by the ECB’s September meeting. Analysts polled by Bloomberg reckon the deposit rate could fall to as low as 1.75% in 2026.
Such predictions are complicated by heightened global uncertainty, Villeroy said.
“Deciding the direction we’ll take after the summer would be an error,” he said in the magazine interview. “It’s not a debate today: We’ll see in the second half where we are in terms of inflation.”
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