We’ve long said the Norges Bank would ease in March in the face of falling crude prices and the continuation of the negative rates regime at the ECB, the Riksbank, and the NationalBank.
Indeed by the time of today’s announcement, the market was pricing in a ~75% chance that Oystein Olsen would cut rates by 25 bps. And he didn’t disappoint, slashing the depo rate to 0.50%. Incidentally, we’d hate to be the 1 economist out of 20 surveyed by Bloomberg that managed to miss this one.