Ben Broadbent: Uncertain times

Speech by Mr Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy of the Bank of England, at the Wall Street Journal, London, 5 October 2016.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Before August, the UK's official interest rate had been held at ½% for over seven years, the longest period of unchanged rates since 1950. No-one on the current MPC was on the Committee when rates were previously changed, in early 2009; indeed there are children now at primary school who weren't even alive at the time. So although the August Inflation Report gave a pretty full account of the reasons for the MPC's decision it wouldn't do any harm to expand on these things a little further. That's what I plan to do today, focussing on two areas.

The first involves one of the main reasons for the revised - and weaker - economic projections we made in the August Inflation Report and the policy easing that accompanied it. This was not a judgement about the ultimate economic effects of the UK's exit from the EU, not least because we are unlikely to know, for quite some time, what that will entail.