ECB's Lane Warns Second Energy Shock Could Keep Inflation Sticky

European Central Bank chief economist Philip Lane said in an interview with Le Temps that a fresh wave of higher energy costs is raising the risk that inflation in the euro zone proves stickier than policymakers had hoped. He flagged the renewed energy pressure as a specific new threat to the disinflation path the ECB has been tracking. The warning follows a separate ECB paper cited by Lane that still expects inflation to return to the central bank's 2% target, but not until sometime from mid-2027 — a year later than many investors had been pricing in. Putting the two remarks together, the message from Frankfurt is that the destination hasn't changed but the timeline has gotten murkier. What remains unresolved is how much of the energy pressure Lane is describing is temporary versus structural, and whether it changes the ECB's rate path before the next policy meeting.