“The risks deriving from new technologies must be managed carefully, especially in a scenario increasingly marked by fears about cyber-security”. This was stated by the president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, in a hearing today in front of the European Parliament.
The possible risks from cyber-attacks “have long been a priority for national and European supervisory authorities – he added – From day one, the ECB's banking supervision has tackled the problem from different points of view. As market infrastructure supervisors we must also ensure that individual systems, as well as the system as a whole, are operationally resilient to cyber-crime."
Draghi then spoke of the Governing Council's monetary policy: "We remain firmly convinced - he said - that an extraordinary level of support is still needed, for the current level of unused resources to be absorbed and for inflation to return and stabilize in sustainably around levels close to 2% in the medium term”.
At the monetary policy meeting in June, "the Governing Council will have at its disposal the updated projections of the ECB staff and a more complete set of information on the basis of which to formulate its assessment on the distribution of risks on the most likely outlook of growth and inflation”, continued the number one of the ECB.
On the other hand, Draghi also reiterated that the economic recovery in the euro area “is increasingly solid and is expanding to more and more sectors and countries. The risks of a worsening growth outlook are declining further” and that some of the extreme risks, such as those of deflation, which were emerging late last year “are declining sharply”.
Yet, despite a more buoyant recovery and “looking beyond the changes in headline inflation in recent months, pressures on underlying prices continue to be limited. Domestic pressures, especially those from wages, are not yet sufficient to sustain a lasting and autonomous convergence of inflation towards our medium-term objective”. For these pressures “to strengthen, we still need a fairly substantial level of monetary accommodation,” Draghi concluded.
