Christine Lagarde: ECB press conference - introductory statement Introductory statement by Ms Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, and Mr Luis de Guindos, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, 15 June 2023. *** Good afternoon, the Vice-President and I welcome you to our press conference. Inflation has been coming down but is projected to remain too high for too long. We are determined to ensure that inflation returns to our two per cent medium-term target in a timely manner. The Governing Council therefore today decided to raise the three key ECB interest rates by 25 basis points. The rate increase today reflects our updated assessment of the inflation outlook, the dynamics of underlying inflation, and the strength of monetary policy transmission. According to the June macroeconomic projections, Eurosystem staff expect headline inflation to average 5.4 per cent in 2023, 3.0 per cent in 2024 and 2.2 per cent in 2025. Indicators of underlying price pressures remain strong, although some show tentative signs of softening. Staff have revised up their projections for inflation excluding energy and food, especially for this year and next year, owing to past upward surprises and the implications of the robust labour market for the speed of disinflation. They now see it reaching 5.1 per cent in 2023, before it declines to 3.0 per cent in 2024 and 2.3 per cent in 2025. Staff have slightly lowered their economic growth projections for this year and next year.
The journey to get there is not over and we have ground to cover. So, we will be as restrictive as long as needed in order to make sure that we reach that destination. Under the current parameters, 2.2% in 2025 is not satisfactory and it's not timely – which is why we are making the decisions that we are making today, and later on. At the end of June banks will reimburse € billion that they had borrowed under TLTRO, which was this very special facility that we had put in place to help the financing of the economy at the time of the pandemic. Those loans were granted for periods of three years and there were various operations in the course of the pandemic. The repayment which is coming due now, is known and has been known for a long time. Actually it was so well-known that it should have been a lot higher than that but we took measures in order to avoid that we had this sort of cliff effect of a massive reimbursement which would have exceeded € trillion. But banks know about it, they have known about it. They have done their funding plans in order to respond to the situation. In any event, we have the normal facilities available, whether it's MRO or LTRO if that was ever needed, just in case. The APP reinvestment will be completed at the end of June, and we will let run-off take place as of July.