Andrew Bailey: MPC ready to hike interest rates before Christmas if inflation keeps rising

Society of Professional Economists speech

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee is prepared to raise interest rates before the year end if inflation continues to rise, according to BoE governor Andrew Bailey.

Bailey, who gave a speech to the Society of Professional Economists at a dinner yesterday evening (27 September), described the UK's current stage of recovery as "the hard yards", with the rate of recovery slowing over recent months and expected to remain sluggish until the "recovery nears its end point". "Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote in their monetary history of the US that the most notable feature of the revival of the US economy after 1933 was not its rapidity but its completeness," he said. "I, and other MPC members, have used the analogy of a bridge to describe the rol...