National Bank of Hungary leaves base rate at 0.9 pc – UPDATE

Hungarian rate-setters left the base rate unchanged at 0.9 percent at a monthly policy meeting on Tuesday.

The Monetary Council also left the overnight deposit rate unchanged at -0.05 percent.

The rates were also kept on hold at the previous policy meeting.

At a meeting in March, National Bank of Hungary rate-setters raised the overnight deposit rate by 10 basis points, marking the first policy tightening in years.

In a statement released after the meeting, the council said macroeconomic data released since the previous policy meeting bear out the baseline projections in the NBH’s latest quarterly Inflation Report, released a month earlier.

“Incoming data confirm the baseline projection in the June Inflation Report,” the council said, explaining that the pace of price growth started to slow in the summer months as the NBH’s measure of core inflation excluding indirect tax effects, a bellwether indicator of underlying inflation, fell to 3.5 percent in June.