LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s recent increase in inflation could prove to be a longer-lasting plateau rather than a short-term hump and the Bank of England should be careful about reducing interest rates, BoE monetary policymaker Megan Greene said on Tuesday.
“I worry about the near-term profile for inflation this year, which in my view now resembles more of a ‘plateau’ than a ‘hump’,” Greene said in a speech at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a think tank.
Greene, who voted to keep borrowing costs on hold at the most recent meeting of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, said conflicting signals from economic data meant she was in no hurry to resume voting for rate cuts.
“Noisy data means that it will take longer for me to take comfort from recent disinflationary trends,” she said. “Given the period of elevated inflation through which we have just come, I think price stability is the key priority.”
Greene said the BoE’s message that it would take a “careful and gradual approach” to cutting rates was still warranted.
(Reporting by William Schomberg; editing by David Milliken)
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