Interview with Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, conducted by Shogo Akagawa on 8 May 2023

10 May 2023

You repeatedly mentioned at the last press conference that the inflation outlook continues to be “too high for too long”. How strong is the upside risk of inflation in the eurozone?

There are factors that can induce significant upside risks to the inflation outlook. And we are still in a situation where uncertainty about the path of inflation is high, so we have to be extremely attentive to those potential risks, the exact list of which you will find in our latest monetary policy statement, in particular in relation to wage increases in various European countries.

We now see waves of strikes across Europe. How serious is the risk of a wage-price spiral as a second-round effect?

The protests, collective bargaining and, in some cases, strikes that we observe in Europe are not surprising, because last year was one where real wages went down significantly. And there is now a…