All sorts of pithy sayings have been handed down from the former President of the Bundesbank, Karl Otto Pöhl, who died in 2014.

He was happy to tell visitors who praised the beautiful view from the upper floors of the Bundesbank's headquarters in Frankfurt that fortunately the concrete building itself cannot be seen from this location.

Pöhl said of inflation that it was like toothpaste: "Once it's out of the tube, you can hardly get it back in." One should therefore "not press too hard".

And Jens Weidmann, who held the office of President of the Bundesbank from 1980 to 1991 years after Pöhl's time, had one piece of advice: "Stay tough."

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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Therefore, when Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), took up this Tuesday evening to give the "Karl Otto Pöhl Lecture" in Frankfurt, a lecture in memory of the quarrelsome former President of the Bundesbank, who liked to mess with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt the constellation already created an interesting tension.

Weidmann held the lecture in 2015 - and used it for small swipes against the ECB's loose monetary policy.

Now the ECB leadership took over the speech for the first time.

Lagarde opened with a quote from Pöhl that was not to be found later in the speech manuscript on the ECB's website.

"It is not natural that we can live on an 'island of stability' - you have to earn that through a consistent stability policy," the former President of the Bundesbank had once warned and Lagarde is now reminding of it.

The ECB President had already been greeted in a friendly and critical manner that evening with the reference to the current 9.1 percent inflation in the euro area - by Jürgen Götz, President of the Frankfurt Society for Trade, Industry and Science.

This traditional organization regularly organizes the Pöhl Lecture.

The second wave of oil price shocks in the early 1980s occurred during Pöhl's tenure.

However, there were no double-digit inflation rates during his tenure, which the Bundesbank now expects to be expected in Germany over the next few months.

Lower inflation after recession?

Lagarde is looking for the historical review this evening, for example, in the question of whether a possibly impending recession in the euro area will lead to a significant reduction in inflation.

"In some previous recessions since the 1970s, headline inflation fell by about 1.1 percentage points a year after the recession," says the ECB President.

However, this rule is “not set in stone”.

In some episodes of recession, for example when attributed to deteriorating supply conditions, inflation has remained stable or even increased.

Even now, the ECB President believes it is at least possible that economic growth will collapse more than expected - and that inflation will still be higher than previously forecast.