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The European Central Bank (ECB) is in waiting mode: Neither interest rates, bond purchases, nor the planned change in strategy are really substantial news at the moment.

Accordingly, the same, often heard phrases were always quoted at the current press conference for all questions on the topic.

The central bank thus fully lived up to the expectations of many ECB observers, who had already expected a “reassuringly boring” press conference beforehand.

Real drive came into the event after about 42 minutes.

ECB President Christine Lagarde was asked what she thought of the Greens' candidate for Chancellor, Annalena Baerbock.

She herself had openly admitted that she had little experience in political office.

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Lagarde - who, as a central banker, could well have pleaded that it is not entitled to comment on the policy of a member state as a currency guardian - took the opportunity to break through the boredom of the standardized event.

"You don't have to be an older gray or white-haired person to go into politics and be recognized for your talent," said the ECB President, praising the Greens' candidate for Chancellor.

Baerbock is a "young woman who is very committed to climate change and environmental protection".

These topics are also very important to her personally.

The ECB President even found Baerbock's athletic trampoline skills remarkable.

The monetary watchdog went much less into detail, even after repeated inquiries about a possible beginning of the end of the bond purchases.

The inflation outlook and financing conditions in the euro zone would set the pace.

Both are complicated topics and a time schedule is difficult.

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"We are not dependent on the calendar, only on the dates," said Lagarde.

This was therefore not an issue in the Governing Council, it had not even been discussed.

The performance shows once again that the former French finance minister and former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) still thinks very politically.

For her predecessor, Mario Draghi, it would hardly have been conceivable to speak in such detail about the domestic political aspects of a member state and climate policy preferences.

Because qua office, the head of the ECB should be the neutral administrator of the euro, who was deliberately excluded from the democratic process in order to be as independent as possible.

Chancellor Merkel also received words of praise from Lagarde: Baerbock's arrival shows that "Chancellor Merkel has not discouraged young women from going into politics," said the top euro guardian.

"That is the value of role models."

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Nevertheless, the urgent question remains when the ECB will slowly pull out of its ultra-loose monetary policy.

Investors want to know because it influences the mood on the stock market.

And consumers want to know that too, whose follow-up financing for the real estate loan may not be due for another year.

The question of entering into the exit is also highly topical insofar as the Bank of Canada had already announced this week that it would be scaling back its bond purchases.

But Lagarde firmly rejected the idea of ​​reducing the pandemic emergency program.

It was "simply premature" to reduce the program, she said.

The economic outlook for the euro zone is still "overshadowed by uncertainty," said Lagarde.

There is still "a long way to go before we have crossed the bridge of the pandemic and the recovery is sustainable and stable".

The so-called Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP) for the purchase of government and corporate bonds comprises a total of 1.85 trillion euros and will run until at least the end of March 2022.

It was not until the last council meeting in mid-March that the ECB decided to even accelerate its bond purchases in the second quarter due to the ongoing corona stress on the economy.

In March, the monetary authorities bought bonds with a volume of 66 billion euros.

In the first two weeks of April it was already around 43 billion euros.

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Market participants can therefore continue to rely on cheap money.

The experts' comments were correspondingly unimaginative.

“The traffic light is still green,” wrote Ulrike Kastens, DWS economist.

And Alexander Krüger, chief economist at Bankhaus Lampe tried a pun.

"ECB remains PEPPig."

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