ECB's Nagel says that despite the ongoing Middle East crisis, the global economy remains on a growth trajectory; easing in core and services is good news, and not seeing second-round effects

ECB's Nagel says that despite the ongoing Middle East crisis, the global economy remains on a growth trajectory; easing in core and services is good news, and not seeing second-round effects.

Comments of this kind from a governing council member sit in the familiar pre-meeting choreography: individual officials test the balance between an external supply shock and the domestic disinflation trend, and the read-through depends on whether the speaker sits near the committee's centre or its hawkish edge, which this speaker historically has. The operative distinction is the one drawn here between headline energy risk and core and services momentum; central banks in this position have tended to look through a commodity shock when second-round wage and price effects are absent, and the explicit denial of those effects is the signal, not the growth assessment. That framing keeps the transmission channel running through core services prints and negotiated wage data rather than through oil, and in past episodes of geopolitical energy scares the curve has priced the inflation risk premium in first and unwound it when officials coalesced around the look-through view. Worth noting is the customary sequence: remarks of this tone from the hawkish flank, if echoed by centrists, have tended to matter more for the path than the same words from the dovish end. The follow-ons are whether peers adopt the same second-round language and how the next core and services releases sit against it.