Tag Archives: ECB monetary policy

The threat to the ECB’s inflation targets posed by the appreciation of the euro is being offset by strengthening growth in the euro area. The ECB should pursue its cautious exit strategy.The trade-weighted EUR has appreciated by 4.8% since the ECB’s June meeting. ECB models and Mario Draghi’s rule of thumb suggest that a stronger currency could lower euro area inflation by about 30-40bp in 2018-2019, all else being equal.But all else is not equal, and the euro area economy is in a very...

The ECB made no change in its forward guidance at its July meeting. Our baseline scenario remains unchanged.At its July meeting, the ECB made no change in its monetary policy statement, as we expected. Importantly, the bias for QE extension “in terms of size and/or duration” was kept in the statement. ECB president Mario Draghi mentioned that the Governing Council (GC) was unanimous in communicating no change to forward guidance.Draghi reiterated that a very substantial degree of...

The euro rose sharply against the US dollar after a speech by Mario Draghi today. We still expect the US dollar to strengthen in the coming months.The euro appreciated significantly against the US dollar (by as much as 1.4% at one stage) on 27 June, reaching a 10-month high. The main reaon was a speech by ECB President Mario Draghi at the ECB forum on central banking at Sintra. To a lesser extent, the ongoing struggle to find legislative consensus among the US Republican Party, highlighted...

Macroview ECB keeps holding pattern, but we expect an extension of bond purchases in December Nothing in today’s ECB press conference challenged our view that quantitative easing (QE) will be extended at the bank’s next policy meeting on 8 December. We continue to expect the bank to use this meeting to announce a six-month extension of its QE programme beyond March 2017, with monthly asset purchases maintained at their current pace of EUR80 bn monthly, resulting in EUR480 bn in extra asset...

Extension of quantitative easing (QE) along with changes to how QE works may be in the offing, but an announcement might wait until December. Ahead of its 8 September policy meeting, the European Central Bank (ECB) has expressed its “concerns” over the lack of upward momentum in core inflation. In our view, it is not a question of whether the ECB will ease (QE extension is a given, and more could be needed at some stage in the future), but more about getting the sequence right in order to...