MADRID (Reuters) – The European Central Bank still needs to raise its interest rates further and then leave them in restrictive territory for a while to bring inflation down to its medium-term goal of 2%, ECB policymaker Pablo Hernandez de Cos said on Monday.
“The process of tightening our monetary policy is well underway, although, based on the information currently available to us, we have some way to go,” De Cos told a financial event in Barcelona according to a copy of his speech posted on the Bank of Spain’s website.
Investors expect the ECB to raise borrowing costs twice more by the end of the summer – taking the rate it pays on bank deposits to 3.75% – before it starts cutting them next year.
De Cos said that “interest rates will have to remain in restrictive territory for an extended period of time to achieve our objective in a sustained manner over time.”
(Reporting by Jesús Aguado, editing by Andrei Khalip)
