HUNGARY
Analyst
Istvan Racz
Former Director, Central BankDatabanks
Recent Country Insights
High CPI-inflation data for December: unexpected and unusual
HUNGARY · In Brief · 14 Jan 2025
For December, everyone expected a sharp upturn by the headline CPI-inflation rate from 3.7% yoy in November: analysts predicted 4.4% yoy, the MNB expected 4.3% yoy, the latter together with unchanged 4.4% yoy for core inflation, fuel prices pushing up the headline rate. However, the actual jump b...
Ukraine tried to hit the TurkStream gas pipeline, so far unsuccessfully
HUNGARY · In Brief · 13 Jan 2025 · 1 response
In recent news of the business as usual category, retail sales grew 0.6% mom, 4.4% yoy in November, marking impressively strengthening consumer demand growth, net fiscal revenue from VAT jumped 16.5% yoy in the same month and 7.5% yoy in January-November, and November industrial output was down 1...
Favourable preliminary fiscal data for full-year 2024
HUNGARY · In Brief · 09 Jan 2025
The Economy Ministry, which the former Finance Ministry has been merged into since the start of January, issued their first preliminary estimate of full-year 2024 fiscal balances this morning. The cash deficit of the central government came out at HUF4096bn or 5.0% of GDP, much higher than the or...
Ukrainian gas transit agreement expired yesterday
HUNGARY · In Brief · 01 Jan 2025 · 1 response
A Happy New Year to all Readers! The 5-year gas transit agreement between Ukraine and Russia expired yesterday, without any extension or replacement, because of Ukraine's reluctance to continue. In principle, this means that from now on, no Russian gas shipments will be transited towards Europe t...
Sitting on a see-saw: Hungary’s credit rating outlook went up and down at the same time
HUNGARY · Report · 18 Dec 2024
Turning to the last month of 2024, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings changed their outlook on exactly the same sovereign debt rating in the opposite direction within just a few days’ time. In our report, we go over the background and the details of these half-empty, half-full kind of decisions. The US...
Today's Monetary Council meeting went pretty much as expected
HUNGARY · In Brief · 17 Dec 2024
Actually, it went almost exactly as analysts, nearly in unison, predicted on Portfolio.hu yesterday. 1. The base rate was kept unchanged at 6.5%. A 'great majority' of the Council voted for holding the rate, meaning that there was one vote for a small rate cut, just as it happened in November.2. ...
Heavy policy agenda early this week
HUNGARY · In Brief · 16 Dec 2024
Here is a brief inventory: 1. The Finance Ministry will cease to exist on January 1, 2025. It will be merged into the Economy Ministry. The related draft law is in parliament now. No surprise at all, this has been long known to the public, together with the essentially certain consequence that mi...
CPI-inflation accelerated in November, but core inflation data still looks quite favorable
HUNGARY · In Brief · 10 Dec 2024 · 1 response
The headline rate of CPI-inflation rose to 3.7% yoy in November, from 3.2% yoy in the previous month, on a 0.5% increase in the CPI in November alone. However, core inflation was only 0.3% mom, 4.4% yoy, the latter moving marginally downwards, from 4.5% yoy in October. The headline rate rose esse...
Wow! Fitch Ratings has raised to Stable from Negative the outlook on its BBB rating for Hungary
HUNGARY · In Brief · 07 Dec 2024
This rating action was exactly the opposite of what Moody's implemented just one week ago. We are happy, of course, but also close to being entirely speechless. In hindsight, it is most likely that Fitch raised its outlook now because Hungary had been on negative outlook for almost two years, whi...