Bailey speech: Short term equilibrium interest rate has probably gone up

While testifying before the UK Economic Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Bank of England (BoE) Governor Andrew Bailey called the latest inflation data "good news" and noted that it showed more downward pressure than they expected.

Key takeaways

"Downward pressure on inflation is quite broad-based."

"Overall inflation data leaves us broadly where we expected to be."

"This week's data does not really change our view from February policy decision."

"We have moved from how restrictive policy needs to be to for how long we need to maintain policy stance."

"Services inflation is not compatible with 2% inflation."

"We are seeing signs of pay growth coming down."

"Latest wage data showed quite a marked reduction but not as far as we thought."

"We need to see more evidence of slowing wage growth to be confident of inflation at 2%."

"Short term equilibrium interest rate has probably gone up."

"I don't think rates are going back to zero, they will be lower than today, probably somewhere in the middle."

"As headline inflation comes down, that will lower inflation expectations and feed into wage bargaining, we are starting to see this process."

"We don't see any evidence of a problem in gilt market due to BoE sales."

Market reaction

These comments failed to trigger a noticeable reaction in GBP/USD. At the time of press, the pair was down 0.3% on the day at 1.2550.