With Thursday’s 0.5 percentage point increase in interest rates to 5%, the Bank of England is hoping to land a knockout blow against inflation.
The latest hike is an admission that 12 rises over more than 18 months have not been enough to tackle the problem. Or, as the minutes said, the impact of shocks from Covid and the energy price crisis “were likely to take longer to unwind than they had done to emerge”, adding that the risks of inflation remaining high “were skewed to the upside”.
