Jul 23, 2026 · 16 min · 9 segments
As the ECB, BOE, and Fed all keep rates on hold, Blake and George explore what's really driving central bank decisions. From energy market pressures in Europe to an unexpectedly hawkish Fed backdrop…
George MoranGuestThey obviously held race as expected, but was there anything there that we should note?
Probably the one thing that I would take away from this statement was they didn't take the opportunity to be more hawkish where they could have been.
And given that we've seen such a big rise in natural gas prices in the last couple of weeks, they probably could have leaned a little bit more hawkish here on the margin if they wanted to, but they didn't take that opportunity.
How about we just do it this way? What are kind of the three biggest takeaways you had from listening to Lagarde today?
She definitely doubled down on that baseline comment from the press statement saying that we were back to the baseline.
So that was clearly something that was discussed quite a lot and they had enough confidence to say.
So she did say that the underlying inflation, there was not strong evidence of second round effects just yet in that data, which was a little bit of a softening from the language at the last meeting.
like the fact that the corporate telephone survey has shown that firms expect weaker wage growth than previously.
This is not often looked at as a survey, but it's something that the ECB puts quite a lot of weight on.
However, I don't think it's easy to be super bullish on European fixed income at this point.
They obviously held race as expected, but was there anything there that we should note?
Probably the one thing that I would take away from this statement was they didn't take the opportunity to be more hawkish where they could have been.
And given that we've seen such a big rise in natural gas prices in the last couple of weeks, they probably could have leaned a little bit more hawkish here on the margin if they wanted to, but they didn't take that opportunity.
How about we just do it this way? What are kind of the three biggest takeaways you had from listening to Lagarde today?
She definitely doubled down on that baseline comment from the press statement saying that we were back to the baseline.
So that was clearly something that was discussed quite a lot and they had enough confidence to say.
So she did say that the underlying inflation, there was not strong evidence of second round effects just yet in that data, which was a little bit of a softening from the language at the last meeting.
like the fact that the corporate telephone survey has shown that firms expect weaker wage growth than previously.
This is not often looked at as a survey, but it's something that the ECB puts quite a lot of weight on.
However, I don't think it's easy to be super bullish on European fixed income at this point.
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