Jeffrey: BoE should have raised interest rates this year

Cazenove Capital Management's CIO Richard Jeffrey said the Bank of England should have raised interest raised this year instead of waiting for perfect economic conditions.

Interest rates have remained at a record low level of 0.5% since March 2009, and analysts at HSBC recently suggested a rate hike may not come until as late as 2016. "We have abnormally low interest rates at the moment. It would have been appropriate for the Bank of England to raise them this year," Jeffrey (pictured) said. "The longer they stay like this, the more they will feed into consumer behaviour and, consequently, the impact on the economy will be bigger when rates do start going up, since people have become used to low rates." In the long term, Jeffrey sees interest rates s...