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The European Central Bank kept its monetary policy unchanged Thursday.
In October, the ECB announced a reduction in the level of its monthly purchases from 60 billion euros ($71 billion) to 30 billion euros. At that time, the bank also said that its quantitative easing program would stay in place until September 2018. It kept the door open to further extensions in the program, depending on the economic conditions of the euro area.
The ECB has particularly struggled to bring up core inflation to its aim of about 2 percent. In the last macroeconomic projections, the central bank said that headline inflation would be 1.5 percent in 2017 and 1.2 percent in 2018.
In terms of growth, the ECB estimated in September a GDP (gross domestic product) rate of 2.2 percent for this year and 1.8 percent in 2018.
