To hike or not to hike? Expert dissensus over post-Covid inflation and the ECB’s policy response

While monetary policy has been a matter of divisive public debate since the Eurozone crisis, extant research has analysed the ECB’s communication but provides scant conceptualisations of interactions with interlocutors. Since increased central bank communication is often seen as a tool for more democratic accountability, this is surprising. Given the technical nature of central bank discourse, monetary policy experts, so-called central bank watchers, are seen to play a critical role in translating and assessing the ECB’s policy publicly. Using the discourse network analyser, this article provides a first understanding of these interactions and the type of actors involved. To conceptualise the Eurozone debate on post-Covid inflation, it examines the related Financial Times coverage in the six weeks leading up to the ECB’s decision to hike interest rates for the first time since 2011. The article’s findings show that dissensus is primarily driven by hawkish national central bankers who assemble important coalitions to influence the ECB’s policy stance. The substantial but highly homogenous group of male, financial market actors with Anglo-American institutional affiliations involved in the debate appears largely dominated by central bankers, without substantial policy or institutional challenges emerging.