UK inflation is falling more slowly than expected and is likely to stay around its current 3 percent level for most of 2012, Bank's policymaker Ben Broadbent said in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.
"Our forecast ... is for (inflation) to bobble around close to this level for much of the rest of the year," Broadbent told Bloomberg TV.
"We still anticipate a decline ... but it looks to be taking slightly longer than we had first thought."
In a speech at Bloomberg's London office, Broadbent rejected calls from the International Monetary Fund for the Bank to further cut its record low interest rates, and said the Bank's capacity to respond to any deepening of the euro zone crisis had limits.
Broadbent, like all but one of the Bank's nine-member Monetary Policy Committee, voted not to extend the central bank's 325 billion pound asset purchase scheme this month.
The knock-on impact on Britain's struggling economy from the financial turmoil in the euro zone means some economists expect the Bank to restart its quantitative easing programme later this year.
Broadbent said he had no reason to suspect any second round of QE would be less effective than the bank's first.
(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by John Stonestreet)
No comments:
Post a Comment