Will the Bank of England ease policy on Thursday?
Pretty much everyone is expecting the Monetary Policy Committee to do the same thing it has done for the past six votes and stand pat on Thursday, when governor-designate Mark Carney is also due to appear before MPs at the Treasury Select Committee.
But one former deputy governor, Sir John Gieve, thinks there’s a chance that the MPC could vote in favour of easing policy. Read more
An honest argument for a dual mandate
Asked today whether the Treasury should scrap the Bank of England’s 2 per cent inflation target, former policy maker and current central banking guru Charles Goodhart said no. The target, he said, had done little to stop the Monetary Policy Committee easing rates and printing money to stave off an economic and financial meltdown.
Andrew Sentance, another ex rate-setter, agreed. “Inflation targeting hasn’t been the constriction it has been played up to be,” he said this morning.
A cynic would argue that this is because in recent years the BoE has ignored price pressures and instead focused on growth; inflation has been above 2 per cent since December 2009 — rising as high as 5.2 per cent in the autumn of 2011. Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
