Good morning. Today’s newsletter comes to you a few minutes late so that we can reflect the latest UK inflation figures, released at 7am by the Office for National Statistics. It’s good news: the headline rate has fallen from 10.1% to 8.7%, taking it into single digits for the first time in eight months.
There were widespread expectations of a real drop this time. Since the same thing was true in April and it didn’t happen then, leading to Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey admitting there are “very big lessons to learn” for its forecasting model, this news will have caused a sigh of relief at the central bank – even though the figure is a bit higher than the 8.4% the Bank expected, and food inflation remains very high, at 19%.
