(Bloomberg) -- European Central Bank Governing Council member Gabriel Makhlouf said there’s no rush to lower interest rates at a faster pace, rejecting the idea of bigger cuts.
“I am still a believer in a prudent and cautious approach,” the Irish official said Monday. “When the policy is working, we are clearly on track to achieve our target I don’t see why we would want to rush to achieve our target.”
While optimistic on the prospect of consumer-price growth moderating to 2%, Makhlouf said he’d prefer to see a gauge of services inflation fall. Even so, he told reporters in Dublin that he’s confident the ECB will meet that goal in 2025.
Makhlouf and his colleagues are expected to deliver a fourth cut of the year in the deposit rate at their final meeting of 2024, in December. Investors and analysts see another 25 basis-point move, with speculation of a larger step having been largely extinguished by stronger-than-anticipated economic-growth data out of the euro zone.
“When we get together in December with my colleagues, we will make the reasoned and very good judgment-based decision,” Makhlouf said. “We’ve said meeting by meeting. I personally believe in meeting by meeting. We will have a new set of projections that will arrive just in advance of the meeting. So lets see what they will tell us.”
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