Not my monkey, not my circus? Negotiating Inflation as the Object of Central Bank Governance

Central banks manage inflation, don’t they? This article examines the negotiation of inflation as an object of central bank governance in the Eurozone. It argues that the ECB negotiates its policy with a network of external experts that publicly comment on central bank policy, so- called ECB watchers. This diverse group of financial analysts, academics, and journalists, through their public position taking on monetary policy, form an epistemic ecosystem which conditions central bankers’ interpretation of vague mandates. This embeddedness becomes pertinent in crises since prominent advocacy coalitions can drive debates over the demand- or supply-driven nature of inflation, turning monetary policy into a matter of controversial public debate. The dual COVID-19 and Ukraine crisis lends itself well as an example of this dynamic as four major storylines can be distinguished and are mobilised for and against central bank intervention (Fraccaroli et al, 2025). Using discourse network analysis, this article traces these storylines in watchers’ contributions in business and broadsheet coverage of Eurozone central banking between the WHO’s declaration of a global pandemic in March 2020 and the ECB’s decision to hike interest rates in June 2022 and assesses their positioning vis-à-vis the ECB’s monetary policy statements. This analysis of advocacy coalitions’ evolution and role in media-based, private-public narration, makes a novel contribution to the existing literature covering central banks’ own narratives as well as their inter- institutional narrative construction. More broadly, the article speaks to the literature on transnational expert communities and their interactions with international technocratic governance institutions.