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A senior Bank of England official said “now is the time” to start cutting interest rates to “stop reducing living standards.”
Swati Dhingra, a member of the nine-member rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee, has been voting for cuts since February.
She is now asking other committee members to join her after seeing inflation fall to the 2 percent target.
Dove call: Swati Dhingra, who sits on the nine-member rate-setting monetary policy committee, has been voting for cuts since February.
“Now is the time to start normalizing so that we can finally stop squeezing living standards the way we have been doing to try to get inflation down,” Dhingra told The Rest is Money podcast.
The Bank raised rates to a 16-year high of 5.25 percent to tame inflation after it rose to 11.1 percent at the end of 2022.
But although inflation has since fallen back to the 2 percent target, interest rates remain at 5.25 percent, raising the cost of mortgages and borrowing for millions of households and businesses.
Some policymakers are reluctant to cut rates for fear of a renewed surge in inflation, but Dhingra said demand in Britain was too weak for that to happen.
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