PARIS, March 20 (Reuters) – The European Central Bank will not be inactive or overreact \u200cto the oil and gas price volatility \u200cand is ready to act to stabilise inflation at \u200bits target of 2%, Bank of France Governor and European Central Bank policymaker Francois Villeroy de Galhau said on Friday.<\/p>\n
“We have the eyes on \u200cthe ball and \u2060the hands ready to act,” he said in an interview with Financial News \u2060website Boursorama.<\/p>\n
Potential rate hikes will be decided meeting by meeting, he said. He added that \u200ba rate \u200bincrease was likelier than \u200ba rate cut, \u200cthough he did not completely rule out the latter.<\/p>\n
The ECB kept its key interest rate at 2% on Thursday, but policymakers expect to discuss hikes in the coming months as the Iran \u200cwar pushes up inflation \u200bin the euro zone.<\/p>\n
Oil and \u200bgas prices have \u200bjumped since U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran \u200cbegan, raising the risk \u200bthat higher energy \u200bcosts will drive up consumer prices and depress economic activity across the 21-nation currency \u200bbloc, which \u200crelies heavily on imported fuel.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Makini \u200bBrice, Gianluca Lo Nostro and Inti Landauro; \u200bEditing by Aidan Lewis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS, March 20 (Reuters) – The European Central Bank will not be inactive or overreact \u200cto the oil…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[170096,11157,170097,170098,42,932,43,135649,163881,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-348859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-bank-of-france-governor","tag-european-central-bank","tag-financial-news-website-boursorama","tag-francois-villeroy-de-galhau","tag-headlines","tag-inflation","tag-news","tag-price-volatility","tag-rate-hikes","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}