The European Central Bank will receive plenty of fresh data in June and July that could bolster the case for interest rate cuts, ECB board member Piero Cipollone told a conference on Wednesday.
The ECB has flagged a rate cut for June 6, but policymakers have largely avoided discussing the policy rate path beyond the initial move, even if a few have already made the case for continued policy easing in July.
"If we see that the incoming data, and we'll receive many data in July and June ... will confirm our confidence that inflation is really (moving) to target, it will be appropriate to remove some of the restriction that we put in place," Cipollone told the IIF forum in Washington.
Cipollone added that commodity market volatility was a risk for inflation and oil prices were a "major concern" for the ECB because the bloc was a large, open economy, which heavily relied on energy imports.
Still, Cipollone, the newest member of the ECB's Executive Board, repeated the bank's most recent message that inflation rates could hover near their current level - 2.4% in March - before falling to the ECB's 2% target in 2025.
He also said that the recent drop in productivity, a big concern for economists, could reverse once the recovery takes hold.
Some argue that productivity fell sharply because firms have been hoarding labour in a quasi-recessionary environment and this will mechanically unwind as the initial phase of growth is unlikely to be accompanied by a further rise in employment.
