Euro interbank borrowing rates see biggest daily surge in over 10 years

By Yoruk Bahceli

(Reuters) -Euro area interbank borrowing rates saw their biggest daily jumps in over 10 years on Tuesday, reflecting huge increases in market expectations for European Central Bank rate hikes.

Euribor is a crucial benchmark as all sorts of financial products, from interest rates swaps, savings accounts to mortgages, are priced off of them. That means increases will reflect a tightening of financial conditions.

The six-month Euribor fixing rose 6.7 basis points from Monday in its biggest daily jump since 2011. Fixed at 0.175% on Tuesday, it was at the highest since 2014.

The 12-month fixing rose 16.5 basis points in its biggest daily jump since 2008. Fixed at 0.957%, it was at the highest since 2012.

The commonly used three-month Euribor fixing rose 3.8 basis points from Monday in its biggest jump since April 2020 and was fixed at -0.243%, the highest since then.

DZ Bank strategist at Rene Albrecht said it was “not surprising” to see the fixings move higher as a result of sharp increases in market pricing of ECB rate hike expectations.

Investors now price almost 90 basis points of ECB rate hikes by September, up from around 75 bps after last week’s policy meeting, while bets on the terminal rate have risen sharply too.

Two-year German bond yields, sensitive to interest rate expectations, rose 19 bps on Monday in their biggest daily rise since 2011.

“I don’t think it’s a credit issue because the money market is still flooded with liquidity due to the TLTROs,” Albrecht said, referring to cheap, long-dated ECB loans.

“I think there’s still some capacity for rates to move up in the money markets before really becoming a problem and restricting economic activity in the broader sense. We just left negative territory,” he added.

Along with bond yields, Euribor rates have risen sharply this year. Both three and six-month Euribor were below -0.50% at the start of the year.

(Reporting by Yoruk Bahceli; editing by Sujata Rao and Dhara Ranasinghe)