The aim in doing so was exactly in line with the May Inflation Report – to reduce modestly the degree of monetary policy accommodation, given a tight labour market and gradually mounting pay pressures, to return inflation to target sustainably. Some context is important here. Voting for a 25 basis point rate rise, a full decade after monetary policy was first placed on an emergency setting, is hardly either surprising or radical. A Bank Rate rise of 25 basis points would still leave monetary conditions in the UK extraordinarily accommodative by any historical metric. And the aim in doing so is to lower the risk of needing to tighten policy less gradually in future and cause a sharper adjustment in the economy. Truth be told, I would have voted to raise Bank Rate at the MPC’s May meeting had data on the economy held firm. What we saw ahead of that meeting was a string of weak data suggesting consumer spending might be faltering. I believed there was option value in waiting to see if these data signalled the start of a lasting retrenchment by households, or were instead a temporary snow or statistical blip. With only a modest policy tightening needed over a number of years to return inflation to target, there was “no rush”. In the event, data on the consumer since the May MPC meeting has, virtually without exception, bounced back strongly. That includes measures of retail spending, consumer confidence and consumer credit.
It is worth noting that the transmission mechanisms under study do not stem from the traditional recommendation of Friedman (1959) in his famous A Program for Monetary Stability, where the focus is on money demand stability and the role of money as a price anchor, and whose analytical base is the quantitative theory of money. Actually, recent works that assign a role to money, and to credit in general, do so because it can reveal future inflationary pressures or because it can contribute to achieve increased stability (Christiano et al., 2007; Goodfriend and McCallum, 2007; Kilponen and Leitemo, 2008). Nonetheless, the empirical evidence on the ability of money to provide information to forecast inflation is not so favorable to monetary aggregates. 5 It is more promising to conceive monetary and credit aggregates as indicators of potential distortions in financial markets, an issue I will discuss in the next section. In this review of inflation targeting regimes it is worth to bear in mind that they are subjected to stress when inflation is of external origin and corresponds to a cost (or supply) shock. A cost shock that increases inflation may require a restrictive monetary policy in order to prevent relative price increases from snowballing into an inflationary spiral. In any case, and to avoid costly repercussions in terms of output losses, a horizon is established to correct deviations, which permits relative price changes to occur without requiring sharp monetary policy adjustments .