Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: The ECB Goes to 2.5% in Berlin, NOS Jumps 4.5% to Keep Lisbon Green, the World Bank Group Backs Mota-Engil in Angola

The European Central Bank raised its three policy rates by a quarter of a point on Thursday, meeting in Berlin rather than Frankfurt, and Christine Lagarde then spent a press conference declining to tell anyone what happens in October. Every major European equity index fell on the news except one. The PSI closed up 0.11%, carried almost single-handedly by a 4.47% jump in NOS, while Brent crude rose another 5.62% to nearly 107 dollars a barrel after Saudi Arabia reported its lowest monthly output since 1990. Elsewhere: the World Bank Group's guarantee arm underwrote Mota-Engil's equity in the Lobito Corridor railway, and the owner of the old Siderurgia Nacional said it will build its own solar farms rather than keep buying power at these prices.

The ECB Raises to 2.5% in Berlin, and Lagarde Will Not Say What Comes Next

The Governing Council of the Banco Central Europeu (European Central Bank) lifted all three of its key rates by 25 basis points on Thursday. The deposit facility rate goes to 2.50%, the rate on main refinancing operations to 2.65%, and the marginal lending facility to 2.90%, all with effect from 16 September 2026. It is the second increase of the year, and it takes the deposit rate to the very top of the 1.75% to 2.50% band that most estimates treat as neutral.

The justification was the war. "The conflict in the Middle East continues to generate inflationary pressures and inflation is expected to remain well above the target for an extended period," the bank said, warning that the outlook remains "extremely uncertain, with risks tilted to the upside for inflation and to the downside for economic growth". Euro-area inflation accelerated to 3.3% in August, having returned to the same 3.3% in Portugal on almost nothing but fuel.

The staff projections are the part worth reading twice. Inflation stays at 3.0% for 2026, unchanged, but the 2027 and 2028 forecasts were both revised up, to 2.5% and 2.1%. That second number is the news: the ECB no longer expects to be back at its 2% target even by the end of 2028. Growth went the other way and was revised up, to 0.9% this year, 1.4% in 2027 and 1.5% in 2028, which the bank attributed to greater than expected resilience.

Asked repeatedly whether a third rise would follow before the end of the year, Lagarde refused. "You can try multiple angles to identify what the next step will be, but that is not the question," she told reporters. "We are not taking a position on the direction to follow at our next meeting." Markets are broadly priced for one more quarter-point by December, but the neutral-rate ceiling the Council has just reached is exactly the sort of line that produces internal opposition to crossing it. Portugal's seat on the Council is held by Álvaro Santos Pereira, governor of the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal).

For Portuguese households the transmission runs through the Euribor, and it has already been running. The latest published fixings are Wednesday's, because the administrator requires a 24-hour delay, so nothing struck today is public yet. On Wednesday the twelve-month rate set at 3.138%, its highest reading of the past week and up from 3.108% last Friday. The six-month sat at 2.800% and the one-month at 2.369%. The three-month is the odd one out: at 2.626% it is actually below the 2.679% it fixed on 4 September, which is a market that had already decided this decision was coming and had begun to look past it. All four of the longer tenors remain above the 2.50% ceiling written into Portugal's savings certificates, which is where savers stopped sharing in the rise and borrowers did not.

Lisbon Was the Only Major European Index to Close Higher, and NOS Did Most of It

The PSI closed at 9,455.72 points, up 10.55 points or 0.11%, its third gain in four sessions. Seven of the sixteen constituents rose, eight fell and one was unchanged. It was, on the day, the exception in Europe: Frankfurt's benchmark fell 0.91%, Paris 0.56%, London 0.57% and Madrid 0.33%, and the S&P 500 was down 0.57% by the Lisbon close.

The single reason Lisbon held is NOS. The telecoms operator rose 4.47% to 5.115 euros, by far the largest move on the board and enough on its own to offset a bad day in retail. No corporate filing or regulatory decision accompanied the move, and neither Jornal de Negócios nor ECO offered a cause for it, so we are not going to invent one. What can be said is that the sector rose across Europe and NOS rose four times as fast as the sector.

Energy did the rest. EDP added 1.29% to 4.785 euros and Galp Energia 0.37% to 21.47 euros, the latter after Goldman Sachs raised its target price on the stock to 26 euros. Banco Comercial Português closed up 0.22% at 1.163 euros, holding the ground above 1.15 that it took on Monday. EDP Renováveis was the exception within the family, slipping 0.15% to 13.12 euros.

The drag was food retail, and it was heavy. Jerónimo Martins fell 2.20% to 17.79 euros and Sonae 1.09% to 1.988 euros. Those are the two names most directly exposed to a central bank that has just told consumers borrowing costs are going up while fuel prices climb, and they traded accordingly.

Crude was the day's other engine. Brent settled 5.62% higher at 106.89 dollars a barrel and West Texas Intermediate 5.89% higher at 101.71, taking Brent's gain to 20.23% over a month and 61.06% over a year. Saudi Arabia told OPEC that its August output fell to the lowest level since 1990, the consequence of restricted passage through the Strait of Hormuz and Houthi attacks on its tankers rather than of any production decision. Gulf OPEC output as a whole still rose 1.6% on the month, because Iraq recovered 24.42% of what the war had taken from it, and total OPEC production reached 24 million barrels a day. Iran's fell 16%. Gold, unusually for a day like this, fell 0.81% to 4,362.35 dollars an ounce.

Wall Street opened lower and stayed there, with the Nasdaq down 1.03% on semiconductor weakness (Intel off 4.55%, Micron 4.09%) and Oracle down 3.01% ahead of its first-quarter results. Apple rose 1.31% on the foldable iPhone Duo launched at its new chief executive's first event. United States initial jobless claims came in at 206,000 for the week to 5 September, down a thousand, with continuing claims at 1.774 million and the insured unemployment rate steady at 1.2%.

The Bond Market Sold Off Before the Decision and Kept Selling After It

Portugal's ten-year yield rose nine basis points to 3.88%, the German Bund seven to 3.51%, and the spread between them widened by two basis points to 37. That is a fraction wider than the 33 basis points it held through last week, and it is the first time in a fortnight that Portugal has given anything back to Germany. It is also still a comfortable position: eleven basis points inside Spain at 3.99%, thirty-one inside Greece at 4.19%, fifty-one inside Italy at 4.39% and fifty-six inside France at 4.44%. Every one of those markets sold off today, and France sold off hardest, up eleven basis points.

The month is the more telling frame. Portugal's ten-year has added 37 basis points in four weeks and sits 80 basis points above where it was a year ago. The A+ that Fitch awarded last Friday has not stopped that, because it was never going to: the repricing is happening to the whole euro-area curve at once, and a sovereign upgrade only changes where you sit within it.

Wednesday's auction is where that cost became a number. The IGCP, Portugal's debt agency, returned from the summer break and placed 400 million euros of the 3.875% February 2030 line, 629 million of the 2.875% October 2034 and 602 million of the 3% June 2035, for 1,631 million euros in the competitive phase. That is at the top of the 1,500 to 1,750 million indicative range, so demand was there. ECO reported that the yields paid rose significantly against previous auctions of the same lines, which is what a 37 basis point monthly move in the secondary market implies.

The euro, meanwhile, did the opposite of what a rate rise is supposed to do to a currency. The ECB's reference rate set at 1.1616 dollars, down from 1.1652 on Wednesday, a fall of about 0.3% on the day the bank tightened. When a central bank raises rates and its currency weakens, the market is telling you it is more worried about the growth forecast than impressed by the rate.

The World Bank Group Underwrites Mota-Engil's Stake in the Lobito Railway

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the World Bank Group arm that issues political-risk cover, has written 62.6 million dollars (53.7 million euros) of guarantees over Mota-Engil's equity investments in Lobito Atlantic Railway, according to a statement sent to Lusa on Thursday. Lobito Atlantic Railway holds a thirty-year concession from the Angolan government over roughly 1,300 kilometres of track running from the Atlantic port of Lobito east to Luau on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, together with the minerals terminal at the port itself.

The corridor is one of the shortest routes between the Copperbelt, the copper and cobalt belt straddling the DRC and Zambia, and international markets, and it is materially faster than the road alternatives that currently carry that traffic. Copper and cobalt are battery and grid-storage inputs, which is why a mineral railway in central Africa attracts a Washington guarantee. MIGA said the project should employ more than 1,600 people directly at peak, 97% of them Angolan nationals, and that it currently employs close to a thousand, including 529 transferred from the state rail and port operators.

"The partnership with MIGA reinforces the conditions needed to make an investment of this scale viable and reflects international confidence in the project," said Manuel Mota, the group's vice-chairman and chief executive, framing it as the continuation of an eighty-year commitment to Angola. For Mota-Engil this is the third significant piece of international news in four sessions, after its first ExxonMobil contract in Mozambique on Monday and the Bogotá award that lifted the stock 5.4% on Tuesday. The shares did not move on today's news, which is the correct response to a guarantee: it de-risks capital already committed rather than winning new work.

Megasa Answers 100 Dollar Oil With 300 Million Euros of Its Own Solar

The Spanish group Megasa, which owns the former Siderurgia Nacional, is preparing to spend more than 300 million euros building photovoltaic generation for self-consumption at its steel plants in Seixal and Maia. The announcement followed the Energy Minister's confirmation of a new support scheme for electro-intensive industry, designed to compensate those firms for the carbon costs embedded in their electricity bills.

Steel is the textbook electro-intensive industry, and an electric arc furnace is essentially a device for converting megawatt hours into product. The economics that make a 300 million euro solar build sensible are the same ones that put Portuguese industry on the wrong side of the energy price curve in the first place: it is cheaper to become your own generator than to keep buying at a price set by gas. It also lands the same week that Portugal's fuel suppliers learned they will have to buy carbon permits for every litre burned in homes and cars from 2028, and against a backdrop in which national emissions rose 1.6% last year while the EU's fell, mostly because of gas-fired power.

Also on the Tape

Tinder sues a Portuguese startup for organising dinners. The Match Group-owned dating app has filed legal action against Swipeless, a northern Portuguese company founded by a Portuguese engineer that arranges dinners between strangers as an alternative to online matching. Its pitch, that "you learn more about someone over a two-hour dinner than in two months of virtual dates", was aimed squarely at the incumbent, and the incumbent noticed. It is a small case with an outsized signal: a Portuguese consumer startup has become annoying enough to a global platform to be worth suing.

TAP now waits for the Budget. The winning bidder will be named in "mid-October", after the 2027 State Budget is presented, according to a source close to the process cited by ECO. The government received Parpública's report on the Air France-KLM and Lufthansa offers on 1 September, and last week's Council of Ministers extended the privatisation deadline to the end of the year while giving both bidders three weeks to improve their offers. The Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, spoke then of "weeks, not months"; mid-October is consistent with that, and it is also after the political weather has been set by the Budget.

Institutional money buys the Lisbon logistics corridor. Davidson Kempner, ECS and Magna Industrial have formed a joint venture to invest in logistics and industrial assets across the Iberian Peninsula, and its first deal is the Benavente Prime Hub: roughly 380,000 square metres of gross construction area in seven phases and up to 48 units, with work starting this year and completion targeted for 2030. The investment figure was not disclosed. The location is not an accident. Benavente has just zoned 32 hectares for business beside the future Luís de Camões airport, and the freight corridor into Greater Lisbon is being priced today for an airport that opens next decade.

The rent coefficient is confirmed. The Instituto Nacional de Estatística (Statistics Portugal) confirmed on Thursday that the average change in the price index excluding housing over the twelve months to August was 2.56%, which is the base for the coefficient that governs the annual rent update. Landlords can therefore raise rents by up to the 2.56% first indicated by the flash estimate in 2027.

Friday

Friday morning brings the first Euribor fixings struck after the decision, published a day in arrears, and the number to watch is whether the twelve-month rate pushes on past Wednesday's 3.138% or whether the three-month keeps easing away from it. Those two moving in opposite directions is the market's way of saying it thinks this cycle has one more step in it and then stops. The equity question is narrower: NOS gained 4.47% on no visible news, and a move like that either extends or gives itself back within a couple of sessions. Beyond that, the calendar belongs to the Budget. The government meets the social partners on Wednesday with its budget proposal on the agenda, and until that document exists neither the TAP decision nor the ten-year yield has much new to react to.