This has afforded some additional time in which to assess trends in demand and the economy’s capacity to meet them, while still leaving scope to implement a further response by monetary policy as and when needed.
Weighing all this up, the Board has decided at each of its recent meetings to maintain, for the time being, the settings which have been in place since November last year. The fact that a number of timely adjustments to monetary policy had already been made gave us some confidence in adopting that approach.