Miles: No further QE needed for now
The economy does not need more stimulus from quantitative easing now, though there could be times where it would do, Bank of England policymaker David Miles has said.
“There could be circumstances under which I would judge the right policy would be to embark on further asset purchases but that’s not how I’ve seen things thus far,” Miles said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.
The Bank conducted £200bn of asset purchases with newly created money between March 2009 and February 2010, and there has been speculation that the weakness of the global economy may prompt it to do more this year.
But Miles said that the economy was strengthening.
“We are on a recovery path, but it’s fragile,” he said. He added that the most likely outcome was that “activity does continue to increase, gross domestic product rises and we might get back to something closer to average rates of growth and inflation moves back down towards target level.”
His outlook broadly corresponds with the central scenario in the Bank’s quarterly inflation report published last Wednesday.