The European Central Bank has kept its policy rates unchanged and stuck to its bond-buying programme at the first monetary policymaking meeting under its new president Christine Lagarde.

Economists had expected the ECB to leave policy unchanged while it assesses the impact of its September cut in interest rates to a record low of minus 0.5 per cent and the recent restart of its programme of bond purchases at a pace of €20bn per month.

The ECB repeated its main message from its last two monetary policy meetings, saying that rates would not rise “until it has seen the inflation outlook robustly converge to a level sufficiently close to, but below, 2 per cent within its projection horizon, and such convergence has been consistently reflected in underlying inflation dynamics”.