Waiting for a rise in interest rates
Bank of England governor Mark Carney has kept everyone guessing as to when interest rates will rise.
When will interest rates rise again in the UK? Not as quickly as the market had expected, judging by the Bank of England's latest quarterly inflation report.Governor Mark Carney said that Britain's economy was returning to "a semblance of normality".
The Bank's forecasts for UK growth improved a bit GDP growth is set to come in at 3.5% in 2014 and 3% in 2015, it now believes. It also cut its estimate for the overall amount of spare capacity' which basically means the level of give' left in the economy to 1% of GDP.
However, the Bank reckons there is more slack in the labour market than it had previously thought. It expects wage growth to come in at just 1.25% this year, from 2.5% previously.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Meanwhile, official figures showed the unemployment rate falling again, to 6.4% in the quarter to the end of June, but also the first drop in earnings since the crisis in 2009.
What the commentators said
Carney said that even if all the spare capacity in the economy was eliminated overnight, the appropriate level of interest rates would be close to where it is now, due to problems such as high household indebtedness and the weak eurozone recovery.
But don't pay too much attention to his dovish noises, said Capital Economics. Carney has changed his tone before; in June he was talking up rates. The bottom line, as Larry Elliott noted on Theguardian.com, is that the Bank "is in the dark about the true state of the economy".
The report said "there is a wide range of views" in the Monetary Policy Committee about the degree of slack in the system the measurement of which is hardly an exact science.
Witness also the "chopping and changing" by Carney in recent months when it came to issuing forward guidance', and establishing which indicators would be most important in deciding the path of interest rates, said Edmund Conway in The Times.
People are waiting with bated breath for supposedly "all-seeing, all powerful" central bankers to tell us what's going on, and to hint at when interest rates should rise. But we should all have learnt from their failure to do anything about the global financial crisis that "central bankers are about as clueless as the rest of us".
Sign up for MoneyWeek's newsletters
Get the latest financial news, insights and expert analysis from our award-winning MoneyWeek team, to help you understand what really matters when it comes to your finances.
Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.
After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.
His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.
Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.
-
What happens if you can’t pay your tax bill, and what is "Time to Pay"?
Millions are due to file their tax return this Friday as the self-assessment deadline closes. Though the nightmare is not over until you pay the taxman what you owe - or face a penalty. But what happens if you can't afford to pay HMRC your tax bill, and what is "Time to Pay"?
By Kalpana Fitzpatrick Published
-
What does Rachel Reeves’s plan for growth mean for UK investors?
Rachel Reeves says she is going “further and faster” to kickstart the UK economy, but investors are unlikely to be persuaded
By Katie Williams Published