ECB has no preset response to Middle East war, Lagarde says

March 12,2026

The European Central Bank will carefully analyse the impact of the war in the Middle East, taking its monetary policy decisions on a “meeting-by-meeting” basis and without any preset stance, President Christine Lagarde said on Thursday.

The ECB will take its decisions “in view of all the data that we can harness, and that we can analyse, and that we can scrutinize with sufficient confidence,” she said.

There is no “preset pace for our monetary policy stance,” Lagarde said during a Q&A session after delivering a speech at the Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy.

“And I think that if you bring these two elements together, it places the ECB and the euro system in a good position to monitor very carefully and to try to understand what the consequences of the current shocks will be in the future,” she added.