Inflation in the euro zone rose to 5.8 percent in February.

This was announced by the European statistical office Eurostat on Wednesday after an initial estimate.

In January, the rate was still 5.1 percent.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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Energy in particular became more expensive, but so did food and services.

The inflation rates in the different euro countries are very different.

According to national calculations, inflation in Germany rose to 5.1 percent in February.

According to the European method of calculating the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, inflation is already at 5.5 percent.

Energy in particular has become more expensive, by 22.5 percent over the year.

But the prices for food (plus 5.3 percent) and services (plus 2.8 percent) also continued to rise.

Goods as a whole rose in price by 7.9 percent.

High rates in the Baltic countries

In other euro countries, inflation is sometimes significantly higher than in Germany;

the rates in some of the Baltic countries have long been in the double digits.

They had been relatively low in France for a long time, probably also due to politically motivated price caps.

However, inflation there also rose in February, from 2.9 to 3.6 percent.

In Italy, according to the European calculation method of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, it even increased from 5.1 to 6.2 percent.

That was the highest rate since the introduction of the euro - in the days of the lira, however, Italy had already recorded very different inflation rates.

The consequences of Russia's attack on Ukraine are hardly reflected in these figures;

the collection of the data has a certain time delay.

Since then, however, energy prices have continued to rise considerably.

Among other things, the oil price is now more than 100 dollars per barrel for the first time in a long time. The already high gas price has also increased further.

And petrol prices are rushing from one historic high to the next from day to day: Super E10, for example, now costs more than 1.80 euros per liter for the first time in history.

The price of heating oil also reached a new all-time high at EUR 112 per 100 liters on Tuesday.

Some economists' hopes that inflation would fall significantly as early as the turn of the year have proven to be misleading.

Special effects related to the pandemic, such as the temporary reduction in VAT in Germany, were not included in the inflation measurement.

But countervailing effects seem to have more than compensated for this.

The European Central Bank (ECB) also recently admitted that the higher inflation rates lasted longer than originally thought. A big question now is whether the European Central Bank will postpone its planned normalization of monetary policy because of the war.

Will the ECB raise interest rates this year?

The Governing Council of the ECB will meet next week for its monetary policy meeting.

President Christine Lagarde spoke very cautiously on Friday about whether the ECB is now postponing the tightening of its monetary policy.

Greek central bank chief Yannis Stournaras had called for the central bank to stay on the ultra-loose course and continue buying bonds at least until the end of the year and formally taking interest rate cuts off the table.

But that doesn't seem to be the majority opinion.

On the financial markets, it is expected that the central bank will act more cautiously than originally planned - but that it will not completely abandon the monetary policy turnaround if the situation does not escalate further.

France's head of the central bank, François Villeroy de Galhau, said that the central bank is more concerned than ever with "optionality": In view of the uncertainty, the ECB should not commit itself and rely on flexibility.

Many economists are now somewhat skeptical as to whether there will be an interest rate hike this year.

Jörg Krämer, Chief Economist at Commerzbank, says: "Before the escalation of the Ukraine crisis, even deaf people like ECB Chief Economist Lane had talked about a possible normalization of monetary policy.

Basically, a majority in the Governing Council tended to take their foot off the gas because of the high inflation.” Whether the ECB will actually do so depends largely on whether Russia reacts to the western sanctions by stopping its gas supplies or whether not.

“If that were to happen, there would be an energy crisis that would severely affect the economy in the euro area.

If that were already apparent in the run-up to the ECB meeting on March 10th, the ECB would probably not decide to end its net asset purchases as of September.

On the other hand, if the Russians continue to deliver gas and if the financial markets remain relatively calm,

It is now eagerly awaited how strongly upcoming collective bargaining will react to the increased inflation.

ECB chief economist Lane had said that as long as wages did not rise by more than 3 percent on average, this was still compatible with the ECB's inflation target of 2 percent, assuming labor productivity growth of 1 percent.