ECB's Kazaks says the ECB must do everything to avoid second round effects, all meetings are live meetings

• All decisions so far have been relatively straightforward.
• Near the upper end of neutral.
• Quite likely restrictive policy will be needed.
• Uncertainty remains very high.

Kazaks has historically sat at the hawkish end of the Governing Council, so commentary of this kind from him tends to read as positioning from that wing rather than the committee's centre of gravity; what has repriced the euro front end in past cycles is whether such language migrates toward the core voters and the President's own framing. The 'all meetings are live' formulation is a standard device central banks use to preserve optionality into a tightening sequence and to resist market pricing that has converged too early on a terminal path, and it has usually preceded data-dependent rather than calendar-dependent hikes. The more substantive signal here is the explicit second-round-effects language plus the view that policy is only near the upper end of neutral and restrictive territory is likely needed: that is an argument about the level of the terminal rate, not just timing, and in comparable episodes that kind of framing has borne more on the belly and longer end of the EGB curve and on peripheral spreads than on the very front. The distinction worth drawing is between wage-driven second-round risk, which has historically kept hawks engaged even as headline inflation rolls over, and demand weakness, which is what has tended to silence them. The follow-ons are whether other, more centrist officials echo the restrictive-policy framing, and how the rhetoric sits against the next wage and negotiated-pay data, which have been the tell for second-round persistence in this cycle.