How the Ukraine war influenced the ECB meeting on Thursday

Frankfurt Expectations are high: top representatives of the European Central Bank (ECB) have prepared the public in the past few weeks for the fact that the central bank could take further steps to normalize monetary policy next Thursday. After years of increasingly inflated total assets due to bond purchases and interest rates even below zero, savers and critics of the ECB’s soft monetary policy are hoping for tightening. The reason for this is persistently high inflation rates, which have regularly exceeded forecasts in recent months and have now reached 5.8 percent.

But now there are growing doubts among economists as to whether this will really happen in March. “We still expect the ECB to stop buying bonds in June and then start raising interest rates in September,” Jari Stehn, European economist at the US bank Goldman Sachs, told Handelsblatt. “But we now believe that she will not make a decision on this in March, but will be based on the data situation in a timely manner.”