ECB Minutes: Deposit rate of 2.50% remained in range of neutral estimates by staff; important to refrain from giving any guidance regarding future interest rate path.

Minutes of this kind tend to confirm rather than surprise, and the ECB's meeting accounts have a track record of carrying a more hawkish or more cautious tint than the press conference delivered at the time, since they record the full governing council rather than the President's curated line. The salient line here is the sitting of the deposit rate within staff estimates of neutral: framing the policy stance as already within the neutral band has historically been how councils justify a slower, meeting-by-meeting cadence, and it shifts the marginal sensitivity from the decision itself to incoming inflation and wage data as the arbiter of the next step. The explicit refusal to guide the path is the standard posture in the later stages of an easing cycle, where past committees in this position have found that any hint of pre-commitment gets priced as a promise and then has to be walked back. The observation that transmission has been smooth matters for the sequencing question: smooth pass-through removes one argument for front-loading further cuts, which has tended to weigh on the front end of EUR rates relative to the belly. Worth noting is the split in risk assessment, since minutes that flag two-sided risks have often preceded a pause rather than an acceleration. The follow-ons are whether speakers in the subsequent weeks echo the neutral framing and how the next staff projections treat the neutral range itself.