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.