BoE meet this week - preview

The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee announce their decision on Thursday along with their most recent inflation report

  • All due at 1100GMT on Thursday August 3

I posted up a preview (and more) on Friday:

This now via Barclays (in brief & bolding mine):

  • Recent policy statements by MPC members may reflect differing perspectives regarding the future path of interest rates but remain broadly consistent because they all remain heavily conditional on incoming data.
  • This means that the MPC does not need to adjust the wording but can get away by insisting on the fact that the future path of exchange rates remains primarily driven by data.
  • Accordingly, we think that Governor Carney will mostly repeat the existing message: GDP growth to remain healthy despite the slowdown, inflation to remain sticky somewhere above the inflation target, the monetary policy stance to remain accommodative and bank rates set to hike sometime in the future, but just not now as the consumer slowdown and uncertainty peaks.
  • The MPC will also welcome a new member as Silvana Tenreyro replaces Kristin Forbes. With Forbes being probably the most hawkish member until she left, and Tenreyro likely neutral to dove based on her previous statements, this replacement will imply a natural shift of the MPC more towards neutral ground.

Also, file this away for the September meeting and beyond:

  • In addition, the Bank also announced it would replace Charlotte Hogg with Sir Dave Ramsden, former HM Treasury official (Director General, Economics & Fiscal Groups, Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury).
  • We believe Ramsden will likely settle in the centre ground of the committee, along with the Governor, Broadbent and Cunliffe. He will join in early September with his maiden vote at September's MPC meeting, but most importantly, the MPC will be complete (nine members) going into the November inflation report, which we expect to be critical.

Back to Thursday's meeting:

  • Despite some members already voting for a hike, we believe that August is far too early for the majority of the MPC to vote for a hike.
  • Even Haldane, who came out on the hawkish side recently, said he would consider voting for a hike later this year, but not immediately.
  • And even if Haldane was considering August to vote for a hike, the recent string of disappointing data is most likely to have have convinced him to postpone his vote, in our view.
  • Hence, a risk scenario to our "no change" call for next week is that the MPC decided to take a step towards a hike and openly refers to this autumn as a likely moment to reassessits monetary policy stance.
  • If that is the opinion of a majority on the MPC, it is likely to be be preceded in August by a unequivocal change in communication, something along the lines Draghi delivered last week for the ECB.
  • Absent of such a shift, we remain confident that the bank will maintain the monetary status quo over the foreseeable future (no change until at least end of 2018). With the addition of Silvana Tenreyro and Dave Ramsden (as of September) and the departure of Kirstin Forbes, our Dove-Hawk gauge shifts away from a hike and back to the centre ground as we see the new members voting along with the majority, at least in their first couple MPCs.

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ps. I posted this earlier today:

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