Concerns over a potential slowdown in Europe are currently not great enough for the European Central Bank (ECB) to change any economic forecasts for the region, a key member of the bank told CNBC Wednesday.
"At this point in time, the impact is not such that it would take us to sort of fundamentally change our outlook," Klaas Knot, the governor of the Dutch central bank and a member of the ECB's Governing Council, told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche.
Knot accepted that there were risks on the horizon that could potentially cause growth to stall, including Brexit, Italy's budget row with the EU and the U.S. trade war with China. He said it was "inevitable" to conclude that there were downside risks for the region.
"What I would also like to point out, however, is the amount of resilience of the euro area economy. It's now much better than it was many years ago. We've seen five years of consecutive growth, over the last four years, growth has consistently exceeded potential growth," he said.
Ultra-low interest rates that were brought in by the ECB after the euro sovereign debt crisis of 2011 are expected to start rising again at the end of summer 2019. It is also set to wind down its massive bond-buying program at the end of this year. However, Knot's comments suggest that current risks won't change any ECB forecasts at this point in time, and thus won't change any future policy moves.
But market players have slowly started to price in the possibility of the ECB not hiking rates until later in 2019. Knot reiterated that the ECB's plan was not a central commitment but an expectation, and the central bank itself has stated that it will remain dependent on incoming data.