KOF Monetary Policy Communicator (MPC)
The KOF MPC figure for 9 March 2017 is 0.12. As communicated by the ECB, there are still no signs of a convincing upward trend in underlying inflation.
At today’s meeting the ECB Governing Council decided to keep all key ECB interest rates unchanged. According to Eurostat’s flash estimate, euro area annual HICP inflation increased further to 2.0% in February, up from 1.8% in January 2017 and 1.1% in December 2016. This reflected mainly a strong increase in annual energy and unprocessed food price inflation. But the ECB still sees no signs of a convincing upward trend in underlying inflation. This is reflected in the Eurosystem staff macroeconomic projections, which foresee annual inflation at 1.7% in 2017, 1.6% in 2018 and 1.7% in 2019. Against this backdrop the ECB confirmed that from April onwards the ECB will continue net asset purchases at a monthly pace of €60 billion until the end of December 2017, or beyond, if necessary.
Current ECB holdings of securities for monetary policy purposes amount to 1,825bn euros (end of January: 1,730bn euros).