US Fed to continue tightening; others will be slow to follow

Despite the pick-up in global growth in the past few months, most of the world’s major central banks are likely to leave policy highly accommodative this year. The ECB may tweak the language in its policy statement in June, but we don’t think it will actually start tapering its asset purchases until next year, and the Bank of Japan is in even less of a hurry to scale back its support. The US Fed is the key exception. We still think it will raise interest rates three more times this year, and another four in 2018.