Philip Lane’s calls to a group of banks and funds right after European Central Bank policy decisions have created confusion among analysts and stoked controversy ahead of a key meeting on December 10.

On December 1, the Wall Street Journal reported the ECB chief economist had made “dozens of private calls” to leading analyst and economists “in an effort to clarify [the ECB’s] sometimes-puzzling public pronouncements”.

The first of these calls took place in March 2020, when ECB president