ECB President Lagarde (Q&A): new additional scenarios will be published "tomorrow, or in the next few days" with respect to the forecasts. Will be a "benign", "adverse" and "severe" scenarios. Differences are primarily determined by the price of energy.

The practical read is that the baseline alone carries less information than the spread across scenarios: markets have historically priced off the adverse case when the governing council is seen to lean on it, and the benign-severe gap effectively brackets where inflation forecasts, and therefore the hiking path, can travel. Lagarde's assertion that the September hike is robust across all three is a familiar piece of central bank communication, defending the most recent move against the range of outcomes rather than pre-committing to the next one, and it leaves the size and pace question open. What matters next is the scenario publication itself, specifically the energy price assumptions underpinning each path and any implied divergence in the inflation profile, since that is what the front end and the belly of the EUR curve will key off. Whether other governing council members frame the next decision against the baseline or the adverse case is the tell on how much of the scenario range is doing the work.