Hold, forward guidance, and the net percentage: three words doing work this week

Three phrases are doing almost all of the work in Monday’s coverage, and they are not synonyms. This entry keeps them apart, using the documents that actually use them on 26 October 2026.

Hold#

A hold means the policy rate is expected to be left where it is. CNBC said the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan were expected to hold their rates steady this week, and that markets were pricing potential hikes from the Bank of Canada and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. MUFG’s snapshot the same morning expected 25-basis-point hikes from Canada and New Zealand and holds from the other three, with the Bank of Japan’s rate described as 1.25%.

“Expected to hold” is a description of an expectation. It can come from a futures price, from a bank’s economists, or from both. MUFG separated those: it gave its own call, and it said the overnight index swap market was close to the same split. CNBC’s sentence is the looser one, “expected” and “pricing in”, without a basis-point figure. Quoting them as one fact erases that difference.

A hold is also not a cut, and it is not an ease. If Wednesday’s Fed statement leaves the rate unchanged while December still carries a hike in the price, the hold and the hike are both in the story. They just do not belong to the same meeting.

Forward guidance#

Forward guidance is what the committee says about meetings that have not happened. Chris Weston of Pepperstone, in the note CNBC quoted, said the decisions themselves might be largely discounted, and that the issue which could move short-term rates was how policymakers shaped expectations for later meetings.

Guidance can be a sentence in a statement, a press-conference answer, or a projection. It is not the rate decision. A desk that writes “the Fed guided” on Monday is writing a document that does not exist yet. The word to use before the statement is “the market is set up to listen for guidance”, which is what Weston’s remark was.

Net percentage#

The ECB’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises, published this morning and covering the third quarter of 2026, is full of net percentages. The release says firms widely reported a further net increase in interest rates on bank loans: net 46%, compared with 42% in the previous quarter. Large firms reported increases more often, net 55% after 41%. Small and medium-sized firms were net 38%, down from 43%.

The ECB’s own note under the charts says the net percentage is that difference. A reader who turns “net 46%” into “almost half of firms paid a higher rate, and the rest paid a lower one” has invented the split. The decreasers could be a small share and the unchanged share could be large. The net does not say.

The same release said bank-loan availability fell by more than financing needs, so the financing-gap indicator stayed positive, at net 2% after net 3%. It also said first-time respondents were a majority of this round’s sample, which makes the numerical questions on selling prices, input costs and inflation harder to read. That warning is part of the definition of this round. Leaving it out makes the net percentages look more comparable to last quarter than the ECB said they are.

Use hold for an expected unchanged rate, guidance for language about later meetings, and net percentage only with the ECB’s subtraction. They are three different objects that happen to be in the same week.

This is a definitions note. It is not legal, monetary or investment advice.