The head of the European Central Bank said inflation has become more unpredictable due to shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - and that policymakers need to take the possibility of such extreme scenarios into account and communicate them to the public as well.
“The world is ahead is more uncertain, and that uncertainty is likely to make inflation more volatile,” ECB President Christine Lagarde said Monday in a speech opening the central bank's annual conference in Sintra, Portugal. “It's pretty basic but that's the reality.”
One reason, she said, was that increasingly regular supply disruptions were leading companies to change their prices more frequently, a habit that goes beyond the recent burst of inflation in the U.S. and Europe and “reflects a structural shift in how firms operate under conditions of permanently higher uncertainty."
