The two readings sit uneasily together. A bank-equity rally built on the premise that the NBP has room to keep cutting from a reference rate that has stood at 3.75% since 5 March 2026 is now being tested by a CPI print running the opposite way. Prices did not keep falling in July, they rebounded, and the rebound traces to the same fuel-cap expiry the desk flagged on 28 July as the trigger for an upward revision to the NBP's inflation path.#

The NBP's own March 2026 projection already assumed CPI would sit above the 3.5% upper band of the target through end-2026 before returning to the 2.5% point target in mid-2027. That round predates both the fuel-cap expiry and the Middle East supply shock now feeding into pump prices. Diesel has broken through PLN 8 a litre and gasoline is at its highest level since July 2022, per wire reporting on the pump-price move. That is a real-economy cost, not a projection input, but it is exactly the channel through which the July print rebounded.#

Set against that, WIG-BANKI has not cracked. It gained 0.33% in the WIG20 alongside it and sits up over 4% on the five-session window from 27 July, with PKO trading at a P/E of 13 and a dividend yield of 4.9%, and Pekao at a P/E of 9.9 with an 8.1% yield. Both are unremarkable multiples for a sector still pricing further easing. The equity market's read has not shifted even as the inflation data it is betting against has moved the wrong way.#

Bank equity is pricing a rate path the July CPI rebound makes harder to deliver on the timetable the market currently assumes.#

This is the same tension the desk named on 28 July, when WIG-BANKI's 1.39% single-session gain was read as a bet that RPP reassurance would outweigh the NBP's own projection. That bet has not paid out or failed. It has simply kept running through a print that argues against it rather than for it. The 29 July note flagged a second, independent risk to the rally: the BIEC Labour Market Index's climb to 77.7, a signal of rising unemployment risk sitting alongside the rate-cut premise. No fresh BIEC or GUS unemployment print has landed since 29 July, so that reading stands as before, neither confirmed nor undercut.#

What would change this: if the NBP's coming July projection round confirms only a modest upward revision to the inflation path consistent with the March round, rather than the materially higher path bank research previews are already flagging, the cut premise underlying the WIG-BANKI rally survives the July CPI print largely intact. If instead the NBP projection moves the return-to-target date to 2027 Q4 or later, versus the March round's mid-2027, that is the print the desk will treat as the one the bank rally has been running ahead of.#