Good morning. I very much don’t want to sound like a doomster or in any way talk Britain down, so let’s just say this: after careful consideration, First Edition is not advising to you make the minutes of the Bank of England’s latest monetary policy committee meeting one of your August beach reads.
Many expected that the Bank would increase interest rates by half a percentage point yesterday to 1.75%, its sixth increase in a row and the steepest in 27 years – and so it did. But the underlying forecasts made for even uglier reading than analysts had predicted.
