Closing summary
It’s been a busy day for business policy chatter, in between this morning’s headlines on the challenges posed by post-Brexit rules for electric car manufacturers, and keynote speeches from Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey at the British Chambers of Commerce annual general meeting in London.
Labour leader Kier Starmer is next to take the stage at the BCC, and you can follow along on our news live blog here:
Here’s a roundup of our other main stories today:
The Financial Times’ economics editor Chris Giles believes Andrew Bailey “has acknowledged for the first time the Bank of England is dealing with a UK wage price spiral” in his speech to the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference.
But is it the first time?
The FT argues that Bailey used novel language when he told business people in London that inflation staying high “reflects second-round effects as the external shocks we have seen interact with the state of the domestic economy,” and that “as headline inflation falls, these second-round effects are unlikely to go away as quickly as they appeared.”
However, in the Bank of England report last week, the monetary policy committee said there were second round effects already in play, and it was possible they would prolong inflation.
It said:
The Committee continues to judge that the risks around the inflation forecast are skewed significantly to the upside, reflecting the possibility that the second-round effects of external cost shocks on inflation in wages and domestic prices may take longer to unwind than they did to emerge.
The mean CPI inflation profile, which incorporates this risk, is at or just below the 2% target in the medium term.
Updated
