Central banks are still sticking to the plan on inflation

Investors had prepared for central banks to raise interest rates. But the Fed and the Bank of England remain dovish – and markets are comfortable with this. John Stepek explains what's going on.

Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England
Andrew Bailey: the Bank of England had its day in the spotlight
(Image credit: © Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The US economy added another 531,000 jobs to payrolls in October – that was higher than expected. Moreover, the figure for September was revised up from 194,000 to 312,000. That was still below the 500,000 that had been expected for that month – but, as you can see, it was a great deal less disappointing than markets thought at the time.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.