PARIS (Reuters) – The European Central Bank has travelled most of the way in its campaign to raise interest rates, French ECB policymaker Francois Villeroy de Galhau said on Wednesday, adding that further rate hikes would be “more marginal”.
“What remains to be done is more marginal,” Villeroy told newspaper group EBRA. “It is the future impact of these past rate hikes that should for the most part allow us to reach our objective within two years.”
Villeroy said the bank was committed to hauling inflation down to 2% by 2025 or perhaps even the end of 2024.
Overall price growth in the 20 nations sharing the euro currency picked up to 7.0% in April from 6.9% a month earlier.
The ECB raised rates by 25 bps to 3.25% last week, slowing the pace of increases but signalling more tightening to come in what markets expect to be the final stage of its fight against inflation.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; editing by Richard Lough)
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