Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast.

I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanne Monsenk and Jack Smith.

So what are we going to talk about today?

I guess we had a lot of reports about inflation and fear about the indicators, what they mean and what they don't mean.

So Wolfgang, you wrote about it quite a lot. Yeah, I did. It's a, it's sort of a theme that,

you know, I've been, you know, when you're getting old, you've seen different, different phases

in your life about inflation and, and you realize at some point that most central bankers are younger

than than yourself. And then you realize when people are, you know,

very confident about the future. And one of things, you know, we've, well, I've learned is that we,

you know, that, that, that, especially when it comes to the forecast of, you know, time series

like inflation, there are, of course, things that we know that impact them, but we cannot be entirely

sure, especially in times like these, where there are so many factors weighing in on this

that it is hard to gauge. Now, there was a concept that, a very useful concept that came up

this week and that the ECB executive board member Isabel Schnabel

mentioned, which is the notion of risk management. She acknowledged that this idea

originated from Alan Greenspan in the 1990s, who brought an awful lot of ideas from finance

into central banking. And he thought of central banking as a form of risk

management, where you basically look at different outcomes and you have to position yourself in

such a way that you can catch the, you know, not only essential expectations, but also these

various risk scenarios on both sides. And there are risk scenarios on both sides.

You know, we should not forget in Europe and in the euro area, the inflation has

undershot the target for a very, very long time.

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