ECB’s Christine Lagarde shifts focus to digital euro rollout after holding rates

With method and preparatory enactment complete, the ECB pressed lawmakers to determination rapidly connected Europe’s nationalist integer currency amid planetary stablecoin concerns.

Dec 18, 2025, 6:22 p.m.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said Thursday the cardinal slope has completed its method and preparatory enactment connected the integer euro and that it is present up to governmental institutions to act. The project, which aims to make a nationalist integer means of payment, is nether reappraisal by the European Council and the European Parliament.

Her remarks came during the ECB’s last property league of the year, wherever policymakers near the eurozone’s cardinal involvement rates unchanged. Lagarde reaffirmed the ECB’s committedness to a meeting-by-meeting attack to complaint decisions, saying they volition beryllium based connected “incoming economical and fiscal data,” the ostentation outlook, and however efficaciously argumentation is working.

“We are not pre-committing to a peculiar complaint path,” Lagarde said, adding that ostentation remains connected way to instrumentality to the ECB’s 2% people by 2028. Revised projections amusement header ostentation averaging 2.1% successful 2025 and dipping beneath people successful 2026 and 2027 earlier rebounding to 2.0% successful 2028.

While monetary argumentation holds steady, Lagarde pointed to the integer euro arsenic a strategical precedence for Europe’s fiscal future.

“Our ambition is to marque definite that successful the integer property determination is simply a currency that is the anchor of stableness for the fiscal system,” she said. The ECB besides called connected E.U. institutions to determination rapidly to follow the integer euro regulation.

ECB committee subordinate Piero Cipollone has besides said a integer euro could guarantee continuity of payments during cyberattacks oregon powerfulness outages that disrupt accepted banking infrastructure.

The integer euro is expected to launch successful the 2nd fractional of 2026, aligning with the timeline of different euro-backed stablecoin initiatives regulated nether Europe’s Markets successful Crypto-Assets, oregon MiCA, regulation.

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