FRANKFURT—The European Central Bank is likely to increase its key interest rate to zero or above by September, President Christine Lagarde said, drawing a line under an eight-year experiment with negative interest rates amid record-high inflation and mounting concerns over the weakness of the euro currency.
The planned 0.5 percentage-point increase in interest rates, outlined in an ECB blog post on Monday, echoes robust moves by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks to phase out easy-money policies as inflation heats up around the globe.
