OREANDA-NEWS  At the next key rate meetings, the leadership of the Central Bank (CB) will lower the bar by 50 basis points, and the trend of monetary policy easing will continue until the end of this year. This forecast was given by the first deputy chairman of VTB Dmitry Pyanov, quoted by TASS.

He expects that each subsequent meeting of the regulator's board of directors will end with a 0.5 percentage point reduction in the key rate. VTB followed a similar forecast at the beginning of the year. Since then, Pyanov noted, the factors contributing to the protracted mitigation of PREP have not gone away.

According to Petr Shcherbachenko, an associate professor at the Financial University under the Government of Russia, a gradual slowdown in consumer price growth and inflationary expectations of citizens is in favor of a gradual reduction in the key rate.

The indicators of steady price growth in the domestic market, the Central Bank explained, remain in the range of 4-5 percent per year, and in general, in 2026, their level will drop to 4.5-5.5 percent. However, the impact of pro-inflationary risks should not be discounted, said the head of the regulator, Elvira Nabiullina. Their growth was ensured by possible changes in fiscal policy, which could eventually lead to an increase in the budget deficit, as well as the war in the Middle East, which led to the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz and a rapid rise in the cost of energy resources. All this can accelerate global inflation, she stated.