The United Kingdom is following suit. The fight against "inflationary pressures" has taken precedence over shocks in the banking sector: the Bank of England (BoE) also raised its key rate on Thursday, imitating the Fed, the ECB and central banks in Switzerland and Norway.

The BoE tightened its rate for the eleventh consecutive time, by 0.25 points, a magnitude similar to that of the all-powerful US Federal Reserve (Fed) the day before. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) followed the path of the European Central Bank (ECB) earlier in the day last week by raising its rate by 0.50 percentage points. In Norway, the central bank chose 25 basis points.

The BoE's key interest rate now stands at 4.25%, the highest since late 2008. Already on Wednesday evening, the Fed had tried with a modest increase to spare the goat and the cabbage, between the financial turbulence of recent days and a persistent price waltz.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the number one target for central banks remains to achieve inflation at 2%, which is still far from being the case. But the collapse of California's Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and then two other US regional banks, has shown how weakened the banking sector has been by the unbridled monetary tightening of recent months.

Banking sector stresses create 'new risks'

For now, the economic crisis seems to worry more in the United States than in Europe. The Fed is now hinting that the end of its cycle of monetary tightening is approaching: it is now adopting the conditional to evoke that "a future tightening of monetary policy may be necessary" instead of an affirmative mode.

It also warned at the end of its meeting that the banks' recent setbacks were "likely (...) to weigh on economic activity, hiring and inflation", stressing that "the magnitude of these effects is uncertain". The risk is not limited in the United States, as evidenced by the precipitous takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS: ECB President Christine Lagarde acknowledged on Wednesday that tensions in the banking sector were creating "new risks" for the economy.

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