The six-month Euribor interest rate, the most used in Portugal for mortgage loans, rose again this Thursday and stood at 0.249%, 0.012 points more than on Wednesday, and also continued to rise at three months.
The six-month Euribor entered positive territory on June 6, after six years and seven months in negative (between November 6, 2015 and June 3, 2022).
The three-month Euribor has also risen again today, advancing to -0.172%, 0.010 points more than on Wednesday.
The 12-month Euribor fell to 1.058%, 0.009 points less.
The Euribor began to rise more significantly since February 4, after the European Central Bank (ECB) admitted that it could raise official interest rates this year due to the increase in inflation in the eurozone and the trend was reinforced with the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
On Wednesday, the ECB promised “flexibility” in monetary policy to ease tension in the debt market, following an emergency meeting of the Board of Governors. At the end of the meeting, the institution announced that “it will apply some flexibility in the reinvestment” of the bonds acquired under the emergency program launched during the pandemic (PEPP).
The ECB also said it intends to “accelerate” the draft of a new “anti-fragmentation” instrument to avoid a sharp divergence between the interest rates of the northern and southern euro zone countries. With these measures, the ECB intends to avert the threat of a new sovereign debt crisis that could jeopardize its anti-inflation policy.
On the same day, the Fed announced that it had decided to raise the benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points, the third increase since March and the largest since 1994.
The evolution of the Euribor interest rates is closely linked to the increases or decreases in the official interest rates of the ECB. The three, six and twelve month Euribor entered negative territory on April 21, 2015, November 6, 2015 and February 5, 2016, respectively.
The Euribor at 3, 6 and 12 months registered its historical minimum, respectively, of -0.605% on December 14, 2021, -0.554% and -0.518% on December 20, 2021.
The Euribor is set by the average of the rates at which a group of 57 banks in the eurozone are willing to lend money to each other in the interbank market.
Source: Observadora
