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The President of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde at the 2025 European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking on June 30, 2025 in Sintra, Portugal. <\/p>\n
Horacio Villalobos | Corbis News | Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The European Central Bank on Thursday kept interest rates steady amid major economic uncertainty, as the European Union scrambles to negotiate a trade agreement<\/a> with the U.S. before the end of the month.<\/p>\n The ECB has cut interest rates at each of its four meetings so far this year, taking its key deposit facility from 3% in January to 2% in June. Last year it reduced rates from a record high of 4%.<\/p>\n “The environment remains exceptionally uncertain, especially because of trade disputes,” the ECB said in a statement.<\/p>\n While annual inflation in the euro area hit the central bank’s 2% target last month<\/a>, traders widely expected a hold in July \u2014 in large part due to geopolitical volatility. The U.S. is the EU’s biggest<\/a> bilateral trade and investment partner and the 27-member bloc exported<\/a> 503 billion euros ($590 billion) in goods to the States last year.<\/p>\n As of Thursday, the future of that trade relationship remained up in the air, with one possibility being a 15% baseline tariff rate<\/a> on all EU imports to the U.S., along with retaliatory measures on the EU’s part.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n