ECB’s Lane confident of hitting inflation goal despite noisy data

LONDON (Reuters) – The European Central Bank is confident that inflation will fall back to its 2% target next year despite some “noisy” inflation along the way, the ECB’s chief economist Philip Lane said on Monday.

“There’s a lot, a fair amount of confidence about the destination in the second half of next year,” Lane told Reuters. “So we do have to interpret the incoming data carefully, but to differentiate the noise and the signal.”

Lane was talking at Reuters NEXT Newsmaker interview at the London Stock Exchange.

(Additional reporting by David Milliken, Marc Jones and Dhara Ranasinghe; Writing by Francesco Canepa in Frankfurt; Editing by Catherine Evans)