Colombia Forecaster Who Foresaw Rate Increase Predicts More

Global Securities’s Daniel Escobar, the only analyst surveyed by Bloomberg to predict Colombia’s interest-rate increase yesterday, says policy makers will raise borrowing costs twice more by June to keep inflation in check.

Escobar correctly forecast that the central bank would raise the benchmark overnight target 25 basis points, or 0.25 percentage point, to 5 percent while the other 31 analysts in the survey predicted no change. The increase is the eighth since the beginning of last year as central bankers seek to cool the fastest economic growth in five years, even as their counterparts from Brazil to Indonesia trimmed interest rates to fend off the effects of Europe’s debt crisis.