In what may have been the most shocking ECB announcement in recent history, moments ago the ECB cut its deposits rate by 10 bps to -0.30%, just as expected.
From the ECB press release [5]:
At today’s meeting the Governing Council of the ECB decided that the interest rate on the deposit facility will be decreased by 10 basis points to -0.30%, with effect from 9 December 2015.
The interest rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rate on the marginal lending facility will remain unchanged at 0.05% and 0.30% respectively.
Further monetary policy measures will be communicated by the President of the ECB at a press conference starting at 14:30 CET today.
But while the rate cut was not unexpected, and was very much in line with consensus, what shocked the markets is that precisely 9 minutes before the ECB's official announcement, the Financial Times [6], now owned by the Nikkei, reported that instead of a rate cut, the ECB had left its rate unchanged:
Policymakers on the governing council left the deposit rate, which applies to a portion of banks’ reserves parked at central banks across the currency area, at minus 0.2 per cent.
Markets had priced in a cut of between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points.
The main refinancing rate remained at 0.05 per cent.
The article can be seen below.
[7]
The commentators could not believe it:
[8]
What happened?
It appears the FT had prepared an article in case the ECB did not cut rates and mistakenly hit publish.
However, a few minutes later, the ECB did cut as expected, and the outcome was that everyone who had stops in either FX or stocks, was stopped out first to the upside, then to the downside, and then to the upside again. All thanks to the FT's poor editorial discretion.
So for those who lost millions on the FT article, apologies.
Correction: please ignore earlier tweet headlined "ECB leaves rates unchanged in shock decision". This was published in error.
— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) December 3, 2015 [9]
Meanwhile, to all those who sold EURUSD to Goldman in hopes of a prompt 300 pips collapse, sorry you've been FT'ed.
And now we await the FT to release another article on what Mario Draghi will not announce in 40 minutes during his press conference.
