euro falls as ecb offers dovish outlook on interest rates.

Daniel Roland | AFP | Getty Images

Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank (ECB) addresses a press conference following the meeting of the ECB’s Governing Council in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, on January 25, 2018.

The euro fell sharply after the European Central Bank (ECB) outlined its exit from quantitative easing (QE), but also claimed interest rates won’t likely budge for more than a year.

Sitting at around 1.1818 versus the dollar before the announcement, the euro fell to 1.1771, shipping around 0.5 percent in value.

The ECB has said that from September the pace of bond buying will fall from 30 billion euros ($34 billion) to 15 billion euros. The figure then falls to zero in December 2018.

Euro investors appeared to focus more on the statement from the bank’s governing council that key ECB rates are to remain at their present levels “at least through the summer of 2019”.

Interest rate on the main refinancing operations, marginal lending facility, and the deposit facility were unchanged today at 0.00 percent, 0.25 percent and -0.40 percent repectively.

In its statement, the central bank added that the rates would stay subdued as long as necessary to ensure euro zone inflation remains on path to hit the central bank’s target of just below 2 percent.