The split the decision rests on
Poland's rate setters left every NBP rate where it was on 9 September: the reference rate at 3.75 per cent, the lombard rate at 4.25 per cent, the deposit rate at 3.25 per cent, the rediscount rate at 3.80 per cent and the discount rate at 3.85 per cent. Inflation had just moved to 3.4 per cent in August from 3 per cent in July, and the annual pace of fuel prices for private transport did most of that work.[1]
Hold the policy rate and you are saying the price of credit cannot reach the thing pushing the index. I read the Bank of Canada's wait at 2.25 per cent the same way a week ago, where gasoline carried a 3 per cent headline while core stayed close to 2 per cent. The Council's own text points in that direction: further moves wait on incoming data, on commodity prices abroad and on global inflation under changing geopolitical conditions.[1], [4]
The bill's timetable
Brent rose 2.8 per cent to 100.70 dollars a barrel this week, its first triple-digit price in nearly six weeks, with the US benchmark grade up 2.4 per cent at 95.28 dollars. The Short-Term Energy Outlook released on 9 September forecasts a Brent average of around 90 dollars a barrel for the second half of 2026 and 74 dollars for 2027, and expects US distillate fuel oil inventories to fall below 100 million barrels in September and to stay under the 2021-2025 five-year low through much of 2027.[3], [2]
That timetable is the point. If the expensive fuel is a matter of months, the household absorbs it out of savings and the firm out of margin, and neither has to reprice anything durable. If it runs through 2027 with distillate stocks under their five-year low, the cost has to move somewhere: into freight rates, into contract renewals, into the wage round. A policy rate held at 3.75 per cent leaves that question open and waits for the answer.[1], [2]
What to watch
The observable test is the shape of the index rather than its level. If Brent stays near 90 dollars a barrel through the rest of 2026 as the outlook expects, the Council's next published inflation reading answers a narrower question: has the increase spread beyond fuel, so that inflation excluding food and energy, which the Council already thinks rose in August, keeps climbing while the fuel contribution flattens? That is the reading that turns a cost increase into a process, and it is the one the hold is betting against.[1], [2]