European Central Bank Governing Council member Klaas Knot said monetary tightening beyond next week’s meeting is anything but guaranteed.
“For July I think it is a necessity, for anything beyond July it would at most be a possibility but by no means a certainty,” the Dutch central bank head told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. “From July onward I think we have to carefully watch what the data tells us on the distribution of risks surrounding the baseline.”
Government bonds extend gains after Knot spoke. The yield on 10-year German securities fell as much as 7 basis points to 2.41%, a two-week low.
The comments come just over a week before officials in Frankfurt are widely expected to raise interest rates again. Some say the most aggressive monetary-tightening cycle of the euro era may need to persist for longer still, as some measures of inflation prove stubborn. Others worry about the economy, which is battling to exit recession.
Speaking to Bloomberg earlier Tuesday in India, Bank of Italy Governor Ignazio Visco — a more dovish voice who’s urged caution on further rate hikes, said price gains may come down more quickly than the ECB projected last month.
It’s “impossible to say” how to vote after next week as there are “a lot of relevant data points coming out in between now and September,” Knot said in Gandhinagar, where he’s attending a meeting of Group of Twenty finance chiefs.
--With assistance from Constantine Courcoulas.
(Updates with market reaction in third paragraph.)
