Looking further ahead, the conditions remain in place for sustained growth of economic activity, in line with our staff projections and other available forecasts. On the external side, the continued strength of global demand should support euro area exports. On the domestic side, investment should further benefit from continued very favourable financing conditions, robust corporate earnings and gains in corporate efficiency.
Alternative proposals seek to redefine the target basket to exclude exogenous items such as food, electricity and petrol. That is a cop-out. In deciding on the appropriate monetary policy stance, we do look at various underlying core measures which do provide us with some idea of the underlying pressures in the economy.