ECB's Escriva: Downside risks are outweighing upside risks
European Central Bank Governing Council member Jose Luis Escriva said late Monday that risks to Eurozone economic forecasts are more to the downside than the upside, per Bloomberg.
Key quotes
The more disruptive scenarios aren’t materializing.
That doesn’t mean they couldn’t take us by surprise. We need to be readier than ever to revise our forecasts, therefore the relevant caution.
Growth risks are more downside than upside.
There are some upside risks, like fiscal policy, as long as it might last, and others.
But downside risks are more obvious than the upside risks.
If we take an uncertainty global index to put a number to uncertainty, then we’re at the highest level since records started.Higher than Covid, of course than the war in Ukraine, higher occasionally than 9/11, higher than the very intense Lehman Brothers episode during the Great Financial Crisis.
Market reaction
At the time of press, the EUR/USD pair was up 0.27% on the day at 1.0801.
ECB FAQs
The European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany, is the reserve bank for the Eurozone. The ECB sets interest rates and manages monetary policy for the region. The ECB primary mandate is to maintain price stability, which means keeping inflation at around 2%. Its primary tool for achieving this is by raising or lowering interest rates. Relatively high interest rates will usually result in a stronger Euro and vice versa. The ECB Governing Council makes monetary policy decisions at meetings held eight times a year. Decisions are made by heads of the Eurozone national banks and six permanent members, including the President of the ECB, Christine Lagarde.
In extreme situations, the European Central Bank can enact a policy tool called Quantitative Easing. QE is the process by which the ECB prints Euros and uses them to buy assets – usually government or corporate bonds – from banks and other financial institutions. QE usually results in a weaker Euro. QE is a last resort when simply lowering interest rates is unlikely to achieve the objective of price stability. The ECB used it during the Great Financial Crisis in 2009-11, in 2015 when inflation remained stubbornly low, as well as during the covid pandemic.
Quantitative tightening (QT) is the reverse of QE. It is undertaken after QE when an economic recovery is underway and inflation starts rising. Whilst in QE the European Central Bank (ECB) purchases government and corporate bonds from financial institutions to provide them with liquidity, in QT the ECB stops buying more bonds, and stops reinvesting the principal maturing on the bonds it already holds. It is usually positive (or bullish) for the Euro.