Together, our monetary policy measures will preserve the ample degree of accommodation that remains necessary for inflation pressures to continue to build up and support headline inflation developments over the medium term. Looking ahead, monetary policy will evolve in a data-dependent and time-consistent manner.
The pick-up of the euro area economy is, however, expected to cause a gradual acceleration of core inflation. This view is supported by the March Eurosystem staff macroeconomic projections. And it demonstrates that blindly relying on core inflation as the major benchmark for monetary policy would be too short-sighted at the current juncture.