- The
UK 's central bank is expected to add another $125 billion of monetarystimulus to boost its asset purchase program and stabilize theeconomy , the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. - The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee is scheduled to announce its latest monetary policy decisions on Thursday, with an extension of quantitative easing likely.
- Data released Wednesday by the country's statistics authority showed UK
inflation dropped to a four-year-low of 0.5% in May as prices for fuel and other retail goods continued to fall. - With the UK economy shrinking by 20% in April and further job losses in May, the central bank is facing intense pressure to do more to shore up the economy.
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The Bank of England is expected to inject another fresh dose of stimulus worth about £100 billion ($125 billion) to financial
The UK's central bank is scheduled to announce its latest monetary policy decisions on Thursday, after a Wednesday meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), with an extension of quantitative easing likely announced. Interest rates are likely to be kept unchanged at 0.1%.
The bank's asset purchase program allows creation of money to flow into large quantities of government bond purchases alongside a smaller scale of corporate debt purchases.
Bank of England's latest
Official data from the Office of National Statistics showed that UK inflation dropped to a four-year low of 0.5% in May, alongside a record slump of 16.7% in fuel costs due to low global oil prices.
That dragged the UK consumer price index — which measures the variation in prices for retail goods and other items — to its lowest level since June 2016, the month in which the UK voted to leave the EU.
The UK's benchmark FTSE 100 was up 0.8% in early European trading "as investors ignored the fact that the UK just posted its lowest inflation number since June 2016," Connor Campbell, a financial analyst at SpreadEx, said in a note.
With the UK economy shrinking by more than 20% in April and further jobless claims in May, the central bank is under immense pressure to continue an influx of a high level of monetary stimulus.
Over two emergency meetings held earlier in March, the bank had announced an increase in its total quantitative easing program to £645 billion ($811 billion) and slashed interest rates from 0.75% to 0.25% in an effort to shore up the economy as financial market uncertainty reached "extreme levels" during the start of the
It then cut rates again to 0.1%, the lowest level in UK history.
The British government had announced £330 billion ($414 billion) of bank loans to support businesses that were faced with distress or about to go bankrupt at the peak of the outbreak.