European Central Bank releases April 2026 Survey of Monetary Analysts questionnaire on rate expectations, APP and PEPP holdings and euro area outlook

The European Central Bank has published the April 2026 questionnaire for its Survey of Monetary Analysts, seeking inputs on the expected path of key ECB interest rates and market rates, Eurosystem asset holdings and refinancing operations, and the euro area macroeconomic outlook. The survey asks for expectations for the deposit facility rate, main refinancing operations rate and marginal lending facility rate around upcoming Governing Council meetings and at quarter-ends, including probability distributions for possible deposit facility rate changes at the next two meetings. It also requests projections for €STR, 3-month EURIBOR, a 10-year €STR-based OIS rate and 10-year government bond yields for Germany, France, Italy and Spain. On the balance sheet, respondents are asked to forecast the Eurosystem stock of bonds under the asset purchase programme and the pandemic emergency purchase programme by quarter and year, with the end of 2026 Q1 reference levels shown as EUR 2,453 billion (APP) and EUR 1,446 billion (PEPP) in book value, and to assign probabilities to when the Transmission Protection Instrument might first be activated. Additional sections cover expected outstanding amounts of main refinancing operations and longer-term refinancing operations, plus quarterly forecasts for real GDP growth, unemployment and HICP inflation (including excluding food and energy), output gap assessments, inflation probabilities relative to 2% for 2026-2029, long-run inflation distributions and a qualitative assessment of risks to growth and inflation.