ECB raises rates by 0.5 percentage points

Interest rates now 2.5%

The European Central Bank raised interest rates by 50bps, in line with economists' expectations.

This puts interest rates at 2.5%, the highest level since the global financial crisis. The ECB's move matched the Bank of England's rate hike on the same day, and both were greater than the US' 0.25% increase. Bank of England meets expectations with 0.5 percentage point hike This is expected to be the first of two interest rate hikes in Q1 this year from the ECB, with the next predicted for March, which the central bank indicated would be the same size. Seema Shah, global chief strategist at Principal Asset Management, said the ECB had taken the idea of data dependency to anothe...