Is a rate rise finally on the cards?

It's high time interest rates were once more on the rise. Is the Bank of England finally coming around, asks Andrew Van Sickle.

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Mark Carney: Unconcerned, but it's high-time he moved
(Image credit: © 2014 Bloomberg Finance LP.)

Last August, after the EU referendum, the Bank of England halved interest rates to 0.25% and restarted quantitative easing (QE). The "folly" of this "panicky" move "may be starting to sink in", says Neil Collins in the Financial Times. Last week, three of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members voted to raise interest rates. While rates stayed at 0.25%, with the MPC down to eight members rather than the usual nine (new recruit, academic Silvana Tenreyro, has since joined), the vote was very tight indeed.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

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.