There’s more at stake than an interest-rate hike at next month’s Bank of England meeting, giving traders extra reason to correctly call the decision from the increasingly unpredictable central bank. If it pulls the trigger and raises interest rates to 0.5%, that would be the first back-to-back hikes since 2004. It also opens the door for the BOE to start reducing its record balance sheet by stopping the reinvestment of expired bonds. That would affect 28 billion pounds ($38 billion) of gilts maturing in March. But while rate increases are a known quantity, so-called quantitative tightening is uncharted territory. For ... (full story)