> So you can blame Xi Ping and Putin, but the ECB has nothing to do with it
Inflation was already high before the Ukraine war started. Gas prices have risen because Europe refuses to buy gas from Russia (and then cries when Russia cuts it off).
Printing money, without productivity support, always generates inflation.
Check
this table. You are right, inflation was already 5% when the war started. You can't have a pandemic with lockdowns and half the population staying at home without a massive cost increase, or productivity loss - it doesn't matter how you call the baby. I was actually surprised that the effect showed up with (roughly) a year of delay..
Then came the war. "Gas prices have risen because Europe refuses to buy gas from Russia" sounds plausible but is not quite correct: EU Member States bought happily any amount of gas they could get. Gas prices soared because everybody feared that it would become scarce as a side effect of the war (and Putin plays this card very well).
So, in essence, I stay with my statement that Xi Ping's Covid and Putin's war explain the inflation, and that the ECB (or the FED) had no influence whatsoever. Note that EU inflation was at -0.27% at the end of 2020, and 0.25% for the whole of 2020.
Now the FED and, later, the ECB have raised the interest rates. That is a standard response to home-made inflation ("printing money"), but it fails almost completely at lowering
imported inflation, as is the case for gas. What Lagarde says in public to justify that act doesn't interest me. I'd rather know what they plan
when it fails, and what it means for some countries with very high public debt such as Japan and Italy. My best guess, however, is that the gas price will be back to normal in about half a year from now.