Sweden’s central bank kept its negative interest rate unchanged and postponed the future rate hikes on Wednesday.
The Executive Board of the Riksbank decided to hold the repo rate unchanged at -0.50 percent and assessed that there will be a longer delay until the repo rate begins to be raised.
The bank previously lowered the rate by 0.15 percentage points in February.
The bank will continue the quantitative easing in the second half of 2016, as decided in April.
Riksbank reiterated that there is still a high level of preparedness to make monetary policy more expansionary if this is needed to safeguard the inflation target.
The bank retained its inflation forecast for 2016 at 1 percent and that for next year was lowered to 1.7 percent from 1.9 percent. The outlook for 2018 was 2.6 percent instead of 2.9 percent.
The GDP growth outlook was trimmed to 3.6 percent from 3.7 percent this year and the 2017 projection to 2.2 percent from 2.7 percent.
On ‘Brexit’, Riksbank said economic activity in Sweden is continuing to strengthen, but there is considerable uncertainty over economic developments abroad and this has increased as a consequence of the result of the British referendum on the EU.
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