ECB Deposit rates will stay low for another 15 months
Draghi said the Bank’s controversial quantitative easing program, which has hovered up more than $3 trillion in government, corporate and agency bonds over the past three years and taken the Bank’s balance sheet close to €5 trillion, will be wound down from October and shut down completely by the end of the year. However, the ECB President said the Bank won’t raise rates until at least the end of next summer, and possibly later than that, if he and his colleagues aren’t convinced that inflation has reached a sustained path towards its “just below 2%” target.
The euro tumbled 1.35% from its session high, the biggest single-day decline since October, to trade at 1.1668 during Draghi’s question-and-answer session with the , during which he both stressed the importance of incoming data to the Bank’s outlook on rates and revealed a modest downgrade to its projections for near-term growth in the Eurozone economy.