The Bank of England has just released the minutes from its first Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting headed by Mark Carney, showing that the governor has succeeded in swinging the whole of the committee behind him in agreeing that there should be no further quantitative easing (QE). Under Mervyn King, the split was normally 6-3 against.
The committee’s meeting earlier this month resulted in no change in interest rates or QE, but did come with a statement warning people not to expect interest rate rises. That’s rare for a decision to make no change, and was widely seen as a form of forward guidance. Today’s minutes confirmed that, and also gave the reasoning behind keeping QE on the back burner:
An expansion of the asset purchase programme remained one means of injecting stimulus, but the Committee would be investigating other options during the month, and it was therefore sensible not to initiate an expansion at this meeting. Given the already large size of the asset purchase programme, there was merit in pursuing a mixed strategy with regards to the different policy instruments at the Committee’s disposal.
The Committee’s August response to the requirement in its remit to assess the merits of forward guidance and intermediate thresholds would shed light on both the quantum of additional stimulus required and the form it should take.
Forward guidance is the new hotness in the central bank game, for reasons I explained when earlier this month:
Monetary policy is, at heart, an expectations game. Interest rates, inflation, and even (to a lesser extent) the quantity of money matter because they change the decisions you make about how to plan for the future. If interest rates are low, you’re likely to invest. If interest rates are low and likely to stay low, you’re likely to invest more. If interest rates are low and the central bank is telling you they’ll stay low for quite some time, well then, you may as well buy some stocks or build a bridge or something, because you aren’t going to make any profit in a savings account.
The next thing to look forward to is the MPC’s explicit assessment of forward guidance, released on 7 August.