Will interest rates rise next year?

published 18 December 2015

Inflation has edged back above zero. The annual increase in the consumer price index (CPI) climbed to 0.1% in November, from -0.1% the month before. Underlying inflation, stripping out volatile food and energy costs, ticked up to 1.2%. Meanwhile, employment rose further in the three months to September, taking the employment rate to a record high of 73.9%, and lowering the unemployment rate to another post-crisis low of 5.2%. The pre-crisis low was 4.7%, reached in 2005. But the claimant count measure of unemployment ticked up, and annual pay growth eased to 2.4% in October, from 3% in September.

What the commentators said

But perhaps not as long as the market thinks, said Capital Economics: its forward projections of interest rates imply no movement from the Bank until 2017. But overall inflation, even if oil prices stay stable at $40, would be back above 1% by next September as the much bigger falls of 2014 passes out of the annual comparison. Imported goods price inflation should climb too as the impact of sterling's recent strength ebbs. Meanwhile, there are signs that productivity is finally beginning to rise, which implies higher pay.

The weekly wage growth data is stronger than it looks, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics. It has been skewed of late by a slight dip in average weekly hours worked to 32. The Centre for Economics and Business Research, moreover, thinks the national living-wage policy could soon push earningsgrowth back up to an annual 3%.That in turn is set to fuel a 3% real increase in inflation-adjusted household spending, the key driver of growth. So the hawks at the bank "could soon have something to get their teeth into", said FT.com. The upshot? Capital Economics and Pantheon Macroeconomics are both pencilling in the first rate rise for the second quarter of 2016.

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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.