Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday criticised the European Central Bank’s hiking of interest rates to fight inflation, warning “the cure risks proving more damaging than the disease”.
“The ECB’s simplistic recipe of raising interest rates does not appear to many to be the right way forward,” she said in a speech to parliament ahead of an EU summit later this week.
“In our countries, the general rise in prices is not due to an economy that is growing too fast”, she said, but other factors, “first and foremost the energy crisis caused by the conflict in Ukraine”.
Meloni was reacting to ECB President Christine Lagarde’s warning Tuesday that the bank would “continue to increase rates in July” unless there was “a material change to the outlook”.— AFP
