Boris Vujčić: Listening to households: expectations, behaviour and monetary policy
SPEECH DIGEST
NEUTRAL high confidence · 4.8k characters readWhat was captured here is only the footnote apparatus of Vujcic's speech on household inflation expectations and central bank communication. There is no body text, no policy signal, no reference to the current rate path. The reference list points to the ECB's Consumer Expectations Survey literature, mortgage-rate transmission work and communication credibility research, which tells you the theme but nothing about the stance.
What’s new: Nothing material. The captured text is a bibliography. No rate guidance, no inflation assessment, no vote or balance-of-views content. Not tradeable.
KEY FINDINGS
- The document as received contains only footnote citations, no speech body. There is no policy content to price; treat as noise until the full text is available.
- Citations centre on household inflation expectations, grocery-price salience, and the effect of communication on perceived credibility. Signals the speech is a communication-strategy piece rather than a stance-setting intervention, which is consistent with low market relevance.
- References include ECB work on mortgage-rate pass-through to consumption and on consumers' housing situations in transmission. Suggests a transmission angle, but with no accompanying text there is no read on whether Vujcic sees policy as restrictive or neutral.
- One citation is dated 19 January 2026 (Wabitsch, ECB Blog), placing the speech no earlier than that. Useful only for dating the remarks; carries no directional information.
Thank you, Michael, and thank you to ESMT for the invitation. It is a pleasure to be here for this inauguration and to speak about a topic to which Michael has made an outstanding contribution: how households form expectations and why those expectations matter for monetary policy. Monetary policy is, by its nature, forward-looking. We track inflation, wages, consumption, credit and financial conditions. But none of these data fully tell us what households believe and how these beliefs feed into their economic and financial decisions, how uncertain they are, or why similar shocks produce different responses across population sub-groups and countries. The insights from expectations surveys matter, because expectations about the future shape decisions and behaviour today.