ECB keeps all rates unchanged, as expected

The European Central Bank kept all its main policy levers unchanged at Thursday meeting, as expected, providing no hints in its policy announcement of any possible changes in its policy bias.

Following its meeting, the Governing Council announced that the interest rates on the central bank's main refinancing operations, marginal lending facility and deposit facility would remain at 0.0%, 0.25% and -0.4%, respectively.

Rate-setters also reiterated their expectation that their key policy rates would stay at present levels "at least through the summer of 2019".

They also repeated a pledge to continue fully reinvesting the principal payments from maturing securities bought under its asset purchase programme past the date when it began to raise interest rates.

Following the release of the ECB's policy statement and as of 1308 GMT, euro/dollar was down by 0.4% to 1.13359.