And slow wage growth makes for a low underlying rate of increase in domestic costs. On this basis, the Board concluded that inflation would not be a barrier to further easing of monetary policy, should that be useful to support demand. But there is little numerical precision that can be attached to these rather qualitative views.
For a few years now the Bank has sought to emphasise the idea of the outlook being probabilistic. The “central forecast” is simply the modal point of a distribution of possible outcomes.