It still looks a little early to me for the majority to swing and it would bring down a torrent of criticism on the Bank’s head. But if not this week, then May, when the Bank will have the benefit of first-quarter GDP figures as well as other data, is beginning to look like a racing certainty.
A rate increase in May, when the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee produces its next inflation report, is looking like a given, says David Smith* in the above quote from his Sunday Times column (£).
For that to happen, there would have to be a major turnaround in the economy, which does not look likely, to say the least. The problem is that consumer and business confidence has collapsed, net trade is still negative, unemployment is rising, youth unemployment is on course to hit the million mark along with falling house prices and growth was negative in the fourth quarter.
I agree with Smith, though, that there will not be a rate increase this week.
With the economy in its current state, such a move would be a disaster and would likely have to be quickly reversed, perhaps even by the Chancellor with his powers under the Bank of England Act. Far from enhancing the MPC’s inflation-fighting credibility, as the MPC members Martin Weale and Andrew Sentance have claimed, there is every possibility that such a move would be a death sentence for the MPC.
Keeping rates down as low as possible and hoping and praying and crossing all of his fingers and his toes that the MPC will do more quantative easing is Osborne’s only plan B. A rate increase would mean he — and probably the coalition — would be finished. (May, by the way, is Sentance’s last meeting and Osborne is unlikely to renew him or replace him with another hawk.)
The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has it right. The MPC needs to focus on the inflation that it is able to impact. Contrary to what Sentance has been foolishly claiming for months, inflation today or next week or in six months time is completely irrelevant for this week’s MPC decision because it takes interest-rate adjustments about 18 months to feed their way through. The current inflation forecast of the MPC is overly optimistic and may well get revised down this month in light of the bad GDP numbers. Even with that forecast, inflation is well below target. Any rate increase would, in all likelihood, push the economy to deflation. The MPC’s new inflation forecast, out next week, will show that inflation will be below target at the forecast horizon.
I have considerable sympathy with Professors Arestis and Sawyer, who argued, in a letter to the Financial Times last week, that the inflation we are experiencing has not been caused by excessive demand and that it would be nonsensical to reduce demand to “solve” it. They wrote: “It has long been recognised that, at best, interest rates by pushing down demand could address demand-push inflation and that they would be helpless in the face of cost-push inflation. At the present time, demand is still low in the UK and clearly significantly below capacity. The pressures on inflation are coming from higher world oil and food prices, value added tax and other tax increases and delayed effects of depreciated exchange rate. It is then clear that raising interest rates has no role to play in bringing down inflation.” “No role” may be a bit strong but they make a good point.
I would go one step further and argue that the whole idea of targeting CPI inflation has failed. At the very least, the MPC’s mandate should be extended to include growth and employment. The inflation measure should include house prices or could just simply be raised to 4 per cent. As I have said many times, happiness research shows that unemployment hurts people much more than inflation, especially now.
Inflation is going to collapse in 2012 when the impact of the one-off increase in VAT, oil and commodity prices and the exchange-rate depreciation mechanically drop out of the inflation calculations. As Mervyn noted in his recent speech, these three items alone account for 3 per cent of the current 3.7 per cent CPI inflation rate.
Inflation is going to go away because of the big output gap in the economy, simple as that. The danger of deflation, however, remains. Unemployment is rising and unless things improve quickly, any increase in rates would send the economy into a downward spiral as the effects of the VAT increase and spending cuts hit home. In all likelihood, Adam Posen is going to prevail and, by the summer, the MPC will be forced to do more QE. David Smith’s racing certainty is likely to fall at the first fence.
*By the way, David, what ever happened to your building skip index? Presumably there aren’t many around since the house price crash and the lack of availability of credit.
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