The March pullback in Eurozone services inflation was heavily impacted by the timing of Easter, with non-travel/tourism related categories looking firmer. While this won’t stand in the way of a 25bp cut on Thursday, it may add tension within the Governing Council around how far into the 1.75-2.25% neutral range the ECB can go. For now, growth risks related to tariffs and associated uncertainty clearly dominate the ECB’s reaction function, but services stickiness adds risk to sub-2% policy rate forecasts.
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Headline advance retail sales were much weaker than expected in February at 0.2% M/M (0.6% expected, -1.2% prior rev from -0.9%), but this was offset by strong performances in core categories. Ex-auto/gas rose 0.5% (vs 0.4% expected, with the "beat" more than offset by a downward revision to prior at -0.8% vs -0.5% prelim). But control group sales rose 1.0% vs the 0.4% expected, more than offsetting the downward revision to Jan (-1.0% vs -0.8% prelim).