At its meeting on 1 August, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to provide some explicit guidance regarding the future conduct of monetary policy. The Committee intends at a minimum to maintain the current highly stimulative stance of monetary policy until economic slack has been substantially reduced, provided this does not entail material risks to either price stability or financial stability. In particular, the MPC intends not to raise Bank Rate from its current level of 0.5% at least until the Labour Force Survey headline measure of the unemployment rate has fallen to a threshold of 7%, ... (full story)