Breaking: Bank of England leaves policy settings unchanged as expected

The Bank of England's (BoE) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided to leave the benchmark interest rate unchanged at 0.10% following the August policy meeting and kept the Asset Purchase Facility steady at £895 billion as widely expected.

Follow our live coverage of the BoE policy announcements and the market reaction.

Additional takeaways as summarized by Reuters

"8 MPC members voted to keep rates unchanged."

"The committee's central expectation is that current elevated global and domestic cost pressures will prove transitory."

"Nonetheless, the economy is projected to experience a more pronounced period of above-target inflation in the near term than expected in the may report."

"The economy is projected to have a margin of excess demand for a period."

"In the medium term, conditioned on the market path for interest rates, inflation is projected to fall back to close to the 2% target."

"The number of full and part-time furloughed jobs has continued to decline as demand has recovered but remained at around 2 million at the end of June."

"There appear to have been difficulties in matching available jobs and workers."

"Overall, the MPC judges that spare capacity has been eroded over the past couple of quarters as demand has outstripped growth in effective supply."

"Frictions in the labour market are judged likely to dissipate over the forecast period, boosting growth ineffective supply capacity."

"The strength in global inflationary pressures was expected to be transitory in the committee’s central projections."

"Above-target inflation was expected to be transitory in the august report projections, as commodity prices were assumed to stabilise, supply shortages assumed to ease and global demand to rebalance away from goods, towards services."

Market reaction

With the initial market reaction, the GBP/USD pair edged higher and was last seen rising 0.42% on the day at 1.3944.