At 12pm today, the Bank of England (BoE) announced an increase in its benchmark interest rate for the first time since August 2007. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted by 7 to 2 to increase the Bank Rate to 0.5% and to continue their programme of quantitative easing (QE), maintaining UK government bond purchases at £435 billion and sterling non-financial corporate bond purchases programme at £10 billion. At the same time, in its Quarterly Inflation Report, the BoE downgraded its expectations for 2017 growth to 1.6%.

 

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