Interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung | Interview with Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, conducted by Markus Zydra, Bastian Brinkmann and Meike Schreiber on 10 January 2022 | Ms Schnabel, inflation in the euro area now stands at 5% – a record high. When are you finally going to intervene? We view these figures with some concern, as they are higher than we initially expected. And we fully understand many people’s worries about the drop in real wages...

Introductory statement by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the meeting of the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of the Parliaments of the European Union (COSAC) | Paris, 14 January 2022 | Before I begin my remarks, I would like to take a moment to honour the memory of President David Sassoli. Like all who knew him, I was deeply saddened by his loss, and I would like to remember him with the words he said in...

There’s a growing interconnectedness between virtual assets and financial markets. Crypto assets such as Bitcoin have matured from an obscure asset class with few users to an integral part of the digital asset revolution, raising financial stability concerns. 'Crypto assets are no longer on the fringe of the financial system.' The market value of these novel assets rose to nearly $3 trillion in November from $620 billion in 2017, on soaring popularity among retail and institutional investors alike, despite high volatility. This...

Shipping costs soared over the past year as consumers unleashed pent-up savings to buy new merchandise while the pandemic continued to snarl the world’s supply chains. Container rates have more than quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, with some of the biggest gains concentrated in the first three quarters of last year. Lockdowns, labor shortages, and strains on logistics networks led to shipping-cost increases and significantly lengthened delivery times , though those pressures are easing. Our Chart of...

Pandemic-related special factors led to unusually low inflation in 2020 and unusually high inflation in 2021, Chief Economist Philip R. Lane tells Il Sole 24 Ore. 2022 is a transition phase: high inflation will be fading this year | Euro area HICP inflation in December hit another record all-time high. Maybe a peak. Markets are now even more convinced that the ECB is going to raise interest rates at the end of this year. Is this data going to derail...

Today, the EU Commission and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) launched the new EU SME Fund, which offers vouchers for EU-based SMEs to help them protect their intellectual property (IP) rights. This is the second EU SME Fund aiming at supporting SMEs in the COVID-19 recovery and green and digital transitions for the next three years (2022-2024). Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: “Small is beautiful, but if SMEs want to grow or take...

During the post-pandemic recovery, the US and UK labour markets show many similarities, albeit with different implications for wages. This box reviews post-pandemic labour market developments in the United States and United Kingdom. It shows that, in both countries, imbalances between labour demand and labour supply are causing a high and unusual tightness for such an early stage in a recovery. This could translate into broad-based wage pressures, in turn posing a risk to inflation. Such pressures are becoming...