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1 week ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn
The European Central Bank today (April 17) cut rates by 25 basis points. The bank’s president, Christine Lagarde, said the ECB’s economic outlook was “clouded by exceptional uncertainty” given the upending of international trade by US president Donald Trump. Strikingly, the bank removed any references to the degree of restrictiveness of its monetary policy. At its previous meeting, it had changed the reference from its policy “remaining restrictive” to being “meaningfully less restrictive”. The
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1 week ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn
The Central Bank of Hungary (MNB) is in talks with the government to change its governing law, and thereby relinquish control over a controversial foundation it established in 2014. Speaking at an event on April 15, the bank’s governor Mihály Varga said the MNB was looking to “cleanse the bank’s profile”, which would mean narrowing its activities to focus on monetary policy. He added that the activities of the MNB’s foundations would fall outside this focus. Varga added that the MNB had reached a
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2 weeks ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn
Few central bankers in Europe have had anything positive to say about the US administration’s policy pivot over the past week. April 2: ‘Liberation day’US president Donald Trump imposed his much-touted tariffs, including a blanket 20% levy on the European Union, on April 2 – a date the US president referred to as “liberation day”. European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde spoke to Newstalk a few hours before the tariffs were enacted, and encouraged the EU to take a “march towards
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2 weeks ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes
The Portuguese criminal investigation police are investigating employees at the country’s central bank in connection with an embezzlement case. The authorities intend to “collect information related to employees” at the Bank of Portugal, investigators said. Police also raided the country’s water authority, registries institute and the general secretariat of the ministry of justice. In a statement on April 3, the police said that the investigation, codenamed “Operation Pactum”, was related to IT
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3 weeks ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn
Sweden’s central bank announced on April 1 that it had completed its annual reassessment of reserves. While continuing to adopt a conservative approach, the Sveriges Riksbank increased its dollar-denominated holdings from 62% to 70%, and reduced its euro-denominated holdings from 22% to 17.5% and its Norwegian krone-denominated assets from 3% to 2.5%. It left the proportion of assets held in sterling and Australian dollars unchanged – both continue to take up 5% of reserves. The Riksbank also left
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3 weeks ago | 
centralbanking.com | Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn |Levente Koroes
Christine Lagarde has said she would like European Union member states’ individual veto rights to be removed to “unleash a “European moment”. In a speech in Dublin today (April 3), the European Central Bank president argued that a “single veto can scupper the collective interest of 26 other countries” – an apparent reference to Hungary, which has used its veto on foreign policy directives to extract political concessions from the bloc. “I have no doubt that we can unleash a ‘European moment’ – if
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1 month ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes |Christopher Jeffery |Daniel Hinge |Daniel Blackburn
The National Bank of Belgium has signalled that politicians should not think about selling any of its 227 tonnes of gold to pay for increased defence spending. In a press release yesterday (March 19), the bank reaffirmed its control over Belgium’s gold reserves, which it said existed “for the accomplishment of the public interest tasks” entrusted to it. It added that the bank’s board of directors was “empowered to take decisions regarding the management of foreign reserve assets and does so with
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1 month ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes
Aleš Michl is not the most traditional central bank governor. He is prone to speak his mind, sometimes without consulting with key staff at the Czech National Bank. He holds ‘unorthodox’ views compared with many of his peers – for example, he believes money supply is an important consideration for monetary policy-making. He was prepared to disregard interest rate advice generated by the CNB’s core economic model, instead using qualitative judgement and high-frequency data to set monetary policy.
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1 month ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes
The availability of reliable banknote suppliers (especially when it comes to paper substrate) has fallen in recent years, due in part to disruptions in the global supply chain associated with the Covid-19 pandemic as well as a shift towards polymer bank notes. As capacity has shrunk, central banks have found it increasingly difficult to source sufficient supply to meet their current and future cash needs.
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1 month ago | 
centralbanking.com | Levente Koroes
In 2021, the Bank of England published its plan for transforming and modernising how it collects data from the supervised financial institutions. It made its goal succinctly clear: “Regulators get the data they need to fulfil their mission, at the lowest possible cost to industry.”This is easier said than done.
