Morning from Europe

French finance minister Le Marie confirmed that electricity costs will rise by 8.6-9.8% nationwide by first of February in a televised appearance yesterday 

This is LESS than penciled in by the ECB in the Q1-HICP forecast (15% was the increase in Feb-2023) and a little less than our projection of 10%.
Another (albeit mildly) soft surprise in relation to the VAT-increases in Q1. This takes our now-cast of French HICP in February to 0.41% MoM against an increase of 1.13% in Feb-2023.

There will be plenty of benign “base effects” in European HICP data in Q1, except from in Italy.

Chart 1: HICP projections for France