2026-09-13 Sunday

Lagarde said the ECB raised key rates because euro area inflation stands at 3.3%, well above its medium-term target, driven by an energy shock from the Middle East conflict and destroyed refining capacity, especially in Russia, and she defended the move against critics who say higher rates risk growth. She attributed rising long-term rates to public finances, particularly in the United States, and to competition from AI-related funding needs — a channel that ties sovereign borrowing costs to private capital demand rather than to euro area fundamentals, and one that lands on France, which she urged toward capital markets union, administrative simplification, labour-market flexibility and pensions.

ECB President Christine Lagarde said euro area companies have seen exports subject to US tariffs fall by almost a fifth since the start of last year. She also said companies trying to sell services across borders face internal barriers estimated to cost the equivalent of a tariff on the full value of the service, and that completing grid interconnections, the Single Market and a European savings-and-payments architecture would let the euro area capture an estimated output gain in the hundreds of billions of euros a year within a decade. She cited Normandy, where small businesses exported goods worth close to a tenth of regional GDP in 2022 and which has been allocated a large European funding envelope for 2021–2027. The tariff hit lands on the export earnings that service French regional debt, while the services barrier, priced at the full value of the service, keeps the offsetting domestic channel closed; what removing it would add to euro area output is the ECB's own estimate. The remarks sit in a speech text published on the ECB's website, not in a Governing Council statement, and the next hard check is the euro area trade balance for the months after the US measures took effect.

KfW Research's September 2026 chartbook puts numbers on German and EU dependence on China across battery, digital/AI and defence supply chains. Germany imported about 17,000 t of permanent magnets in 2025, 90% of them directly from China, and the stated aim is to halve that share by 2035. The IEA contribution adds 512 kt of copper demand from data-centre expansion by 2030, plus a low single-digit percentage for rare earths and up to roughly a tenth for gallium, while S&P Global sees a double-digit-megatonne copper supply gap by 2040. The recycling side is where China's lead compounds: its EV battery recycling market reached $78bn in 2024 and could grow to $139bn by 2030, with 63% of international battery circular-economy patent filings in 2023. For public finance the channel is the cost of the substitution itself — the halving target for magnet imports by 2035 implies domestic or allied capacity that has to be financed, and the copper and gallium figures set the input costs of the grid and defence programmes that sit on sovereign balance sheets. The chartbook is a research note, not a statistical release, so nothing in it is scheduled for revision; the checkable marker is the 2035 halving target, which would show up first in German import statistics for permanent magnets, currently running at 17,000 t a year with 90% from China.

The Bank of England's Agents' summary of business conditions for September 2026 reports the cumulative average pay settlement for 2026 ticked up only slightly from the prior reading, mainly on new information on April settlements, with around a fifth of employees still to settle after April. Output growth improved in some business services and manufactured exports, but consumer spending is subdued and construction activity is falling; expectations for year-end food price inflation eased toward the bottom of the range cited last month. The marginal rise in the settlement average feeds directly into the wage component of services CPI, the stickiest input to the MPC's inflation forecast, and the Low Pay Commission's early estimate of a further increase in the National Living Wage for 2027, published on 1 April 2026, sets a floor under next year's settlements. The detail sits in the Agents' summary rather than the MPC minutes, and the September CPI release is where the services component would have to move to confirm the pass-through.