ECB speeches ‘twice as religious’ as other central banks’ – blog
Bank’s speechwriters use devotional tropes during times of crisis, LSE research finds
Speeches by European Central Bank officials are “twice as religious” as those from other central banks, new research has concluded.
A blog post from London School of Economics researcher David Barkhausen and colleagues, published on August 17, examines how frequently religious terms appear in ECB speeches between 1997 and 2025.
The terms that appear most often are “virtuous cycle/virtuous circle” (90 mentions), followed by “austerity” (30 mentions), “(un)orthodoxy/(un)orthodox” (31 instances), and
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