Every six weeks the ECB governing council convenes to decide what to do with monetary policy. Yesterday, the decision was to keep interest rates unchanged. What happens is that President Christine Lagarde speaks to the media, the markets respond, and commentators second-guess the decisions. Second-guessing is part and parcel of running central banks because they have multiple targets. Where there are multiple targets there’s room for debate and criticism. Strictly speaking, the ECB has one target — it’s mandated to keep inflation at two per cent over the medium term. But in practice that’s not what it does. In practice,…

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