At today’s meeting the Governing Council of the ECB decided that the interest rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 0.00%, 0.25% and -0.40% respectively. The Governing Council expects the key ECB interest rates to remain at their present levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of the net asset purchases. Regarding non-standard monetary policy measures, the Governing Council confirms that the net asset purchases, at the current monthly pace of €30 billion, are intended to run until the ... (full story)

The European Central Bank (ECB) opted to keep interest rates unchanged Thursday and to continue its asset purchase program until September. At the bank's last monetary policy meeting in January, policymakers agreed that it was too early to make changes to the current level of stimulus, but admitted there could be changes in "early" 2018. However, analysts hold very different views regarding the future of the quantitative easing (QE) program. Wolfgang Kiener, senior analyst at BayernLB, told CNBC via email: "Given only a slow increase of core inflation, we expect the ECB to reduce QE from October on to 15 billion ... (full story)