ECB to end stimulus in prelude to rate hikes

FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank is set to draw a line under its massive bond-buying stimulus program at a meeting in Amsterdam on Thursday, as inflation in the eurozone soars to alltime highs.

The decision, already extensively flagged in advance by senior policymakers, is then expected to pave the way for the ECB to raise its interest rates for the first time in over a decade in the weeks that follow.

Eurozone consumer prices rose by 8.1 percent year-on-year in May, a record since the single currency was launched and well above the ECB’s own target of 2 percent.

The surge, driven by the conflict in Ukraine and the consequent rise in energy prices, has boosted calls for the ECB to move more quickly to end its expansionary monetary policy.

The ECB is lagging behind the central banks in Britain and the United States, which have moved aggressively to try to stamp out inflation.

But the ECB first plans to discontinue asset purchases under its crisis-era stimulus program before proceeding to actual rate hikes.

The so-called asset purchase program, or APP, is the last in a series of debt purchasing measures worth a total of around 5 trillion euros ($5.4 trillion) deployed by the ECB since 2014. ECB chief Christine Lagarde recently suggested that the APP would “end very early in the third quarter”.

Carsten Brzeski, ING’s head of macro, said the comments by Lagarde were “remarkable” in that she has taken the unusual step of mapping out a timetable for ECB policy into the second half of the year.

Lagarde said rates were set to “lift off” at the ECB’s meeting in July — the first upward move in borrowing costs in over a decade — and the euro’s guardian would then close the era of negative interest rates by the end of September.

Of the ECB’s three main interest rates, the so-called deposit rate — which is normally the interest commercial banks would receive for parking their cash with the ECB overnight — has been negative since 2014.

A negative rate effectively means that commercial banks have to pay the ECB to park their cash, a move introduced by the then president Mario Draghi to keep cash circulating in the eurozone financial system at a time of looming deflation.

Brzeski said the ECB “has clearly passed the stage of discussing whether and even when policy rates should be increased” and the “only discussion” for the coming weeks was how big the first step would be.

A number of governing council members have openly discussed the possibility of a 50 basis-point, or halfpoint, hike to lift ECB interest rates out of negative territory in one go.