The July ECB meeting was a non-event. I know everyone was on tenterhooks.

That latter bit’s sarcasm. I doubt seriously there’s a single reader who cared anything at all about Thursday’s policy decision in Frankfurt.

There was no chance of a July move from Christine Lagarde and co., who braved a cautious first rate cut just a few weeks ago at the June policy gathering. The bank’s widely expected to cut again in September.

The new statement retained a cautious tone on inflation. Current policy settings are “keeping financing conditions restrictive” but “domestic price pressures are still high, services inflation is elevated and headline inflation is likely to remain above the target well into next year,” officials said.

The familiar figure above gives you a snapshot. By and large, inflation’s near enough to target for the ECB to claim the situation’s under control, but policymakers remain wary of domestic price pressures, which is to say wage-price dynamics, particularly in the services sector.

European services inflation spent the last eight months stuck around 4%. Disinflation progress on that front stalled in November.

“There haven’t been a lot of important data releases since the ECB’s June meeting,” ING’s Carsten Brzeski wrote Thursday.

“Sticky services inflation and continued wage pressure have increased upward risks to [staff inflation] forecasts [b]ut for now, there simply hasn’t been enough new data for the ECB to change course,” Brzeski went on.

And they aren’t going to “change course,” by the way, at least not if that’s supposed to mean turning hawkish again.

Lagarde on Thursday tried to make the case that a move at the September meeting — which is a very long way away — isn’t a foregone conclusion. “The question of what we do in September is wide open and will be determined on the basis of all the data that we will be receiving,” she declared.

I don’t think it’s “wide open” at all. I tend to think they’ve already made up their minds. The next meeting’s a cut barring some extraordinary turn that presents a clear and present danger of a meaningful pickup in price pressures.

The statement was devoid entirely of forward guidance. Policy will be determined on a meeting-by-meeting basis, and the Governing Council “is not pre-committing to a particular rate path.”