PARIS (Reuters) -Euro zone inflation is too high and the European Central Bank’s monetary policy “still has a bit of way to go” to bring back inflation towards its 2% goal, ECB President Christine Lagarde said on Thursday.
“Our monetary policy must obviously deploy all its tools to bring inflation to the 2% target in the medium-term,” Lagarde told a conference held at French elite school Polytechnique in Paris.
“This exercise is under way. We already used most of our tools, there is still a bit of a way to go,” she added.
“The length of the path will obviously depend on a number of factors and notably the impact on credit and its availability (after) the financial problems we have known,” she added in reference to recent tensions in the banking sector.
The ECB is expected to raise interest rates for a seventh straight meeting at its next meeting on May 4 in a bid to bring down stubbornly high inflation in the euro zone, with policymakers converging on a 25-basis-point hike, sources with direct knowledge of the discussion have told Reuters.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; Blandine Henault, Editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten and Leigh Thomas)
