LONDON (Reuters) -The Bank of England will probably need to start cutting interest rates sooner than previously thought after raising them sharply in recent months despite signs of weaker inflation pressures, monetary policymaker Silvana Tenreyro said on Tuesday.
“I expect that the high current level of Bank Rate will require an earlier and faster reversal, to avoid a significant inflation undershoot,” Tenreyro said in the text of a speech she was due to make at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in Glasgow.
Tenreyro cast one of two votes to leave borrowing costs on hold in March while a majority of her colleagues on the Monetary Policy Committee backed a 25 basis-point increase in Bank Rate to 4.25%, and has opposed rate rises since December.
Investors currently put a 75% chance on a further quarter-point rate hike by the BoE in May and more than a 50% probability on another such increase by August.
But Tenreyro said there were signs of a cooling in the labour market from private-sector pay growth data, which had fallen back sharply in recent months, and she expected inflation would fall well below the BoE’s 2% target.
“With Bank Rate moving further into restrictive territory, I think a looser stance is needed to meet the inflation target in the medium term,” she said.
Tenreyro used her speech mostly to explain the BoE’s bond-buying and bond-selling programmes. She said the MPC had not used its ongoing bond sales, known as quantitative tightening, as an active tool to tighten monetary policy, and disputed the characterisation of quantitative easing as money-printing.
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