ECB leaves interest rates unchanged in December as expected

• ECB keeps interest rate on main refinancing operation steady at 0%.
• Shared currency doesn't react to expected rate decision.
• ECB President Lagarde will appear in her first press conference at 13:30 GMT.

At its monetary policy meeting held on December 12th, the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to leave the interest rates on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility unchanged at 0.00%, 0.25% and -0.50%, respectively, as expected. Attention now turns to ECB President Christine Lagarde's first press conference at 13:30 GMT.

The EUR/USD pair's reaction was largely muted to the ECB's remarks and was last seen posting small daily gains near 1.1130.

Key takeaways

"ECB expects interest rates to remain at their present or lower levels until it has seen inflation outlook robustly converge to a level sufficiently close to, but below, 2% within its projection horizon, and such convergence has been consistently reflected in underlying inflation dynamics."

"On 1 November net purchases were restarted under ECB's APP at a monthly pace of €20 billion."

"ECB expects them to run for as long as necessary to reinforce accommodative impact of its policy rates, and to end shortly before it starts raising interest rates."

"ECB intends to continue reinvesting, in full, principal payments from maturing securities purchased under app for an extended period of time past date when it starts raising interest rates, and in any case for as long as necessary to maintain favourable liquidity conditions and an ample degree of monetary accommodation."