Profits are maintained in Europe with the support of the ECB and BoE (upd)

LAST UPDATE 15:29

European stock markets continued to make strong gains on Thursday after the Bank of England’s surprise move to raise interest rates and the ECB’s decision to further slow down bond markets in the emergency pandemic (PEPP) program.

The European Central Bank also officially announced that it will suspend net purchases in PEPP at the end of March 2022.

In the first quarter of 2022, the Board expects to conduct net purchases under PEPP at a slower pace than in the previous quarter, the ECB said in a statement following the conclusion of its latest monetary policy meeting in 2021.

In addition, the Bank of England became the first central bank in the developed economies to raise its key interest rate to tackle inflation.

In particular, the BoE raised its key interest rate by 15 basis points to 0.25% in today’s session, disproving analysts who expected it to hold it at 0.1%.

It was preceded by the decision of the Federal Reserve on Wednesday to proceed faster with the reduction of the quantitative easing program it is implementing in order to be able to start interest rate increases earlier in 2022.

In particular, the Fed announced that it will shrink monthly bond purchases at twice the rate it had previously announced, by $ 30 billion a month, with the program ending in March 2022.

In the Fed forecasts, central bank officials see even three interest rate hikes in 2022, with two more to follow next year.

The Fed’s decisions follow the jump in inflation to 6.8% in November, the highest level since 1982.

On the board, the pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 1.45% to 478.64 points.

The German DAX gained 1.59% to 15,722.37 points, the French CAC 40 rose 1.39% to 7,023.90 points, while the British FTSE 100 strengthened 0.97% to 7,240.16 points.

In the periphery, the Italian FTSE MIB gains 1.06%, while the Spanish IBEX 35 jumps 1.67%.