ECB's Radev says the ECB is not on a pre-determined path. Reiterates ECB risk language around growth and inflation.

The operative question is always whether the speaker is restating the consensus line or signalling a shift in it, and nothing in this language does the latter; reaffirming the existing risk balance around growth and inflation is the kind of comment that confirms rather than reprices. Radev sits on the more hawkish end of the Council's distribution, so the weight of any signal from him lies in deviations from that known position rather than in repetition of it. Where comments like this have mattered in past episodes is when they arrive against market pricing that has run ahead of the data, in which case the no-predetermined-path line functions as a gentle pushback on the front end and the belly of the curve rather than on the long end. The follow-ons worth tracking are whether other Council members echo the same formulation in the coming days and how the language reads against the next round of inflation and activity prints, since it is the data and not the rhetoric that has set the path in prior cycles. Absent a deviation in tone, this is continuity, not information.