April 06 BoE Interest rate meeting minutes |
Minutes of the Bank of England’s April meeting have shown that 7 of the 8 members of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to keep rates at 4.5%, and 1 member voted to reduce the rate by 0.25%.
The MPC would normally have 9 members, but Richard Lambert left the MPC in March to become head of the CBI, and he is yet to be replaced.
Mervyn King, Rachel Lomax, John Gieve, Kate Barker, Charles Bean, Paul Tucker and David Walton were the members who voted to keep the rate at 4.5%, while Stephen Nickell voted to reduce the rate to 4.25% due to there being spare capacity in the economy.
While interest rates around the world had risen slightly since the MPC’s March meeting, share prices had also risen, house prices remained stable, and the exchange rate had fallen by around 1%. Given these facts, the Committee agreed to keep the interest rate at 4.5%.
