Mark Carney’s most memorable moment as the Governor of the Bank of England was his speech on June 12, at the Mansion House in London.
Unfortunately, what it will be remembered for is being dead wrong.
The MPC’s current guidance makes clear that we will set monetary policy to meet the inflation target while using up that spare capacity. This has implications for the timing, pace and degree of Bank Rate increases.
There’s already great speculation about the exact timing of the first rate hike and this decision is becoming more balanced.
It could happen sooner than markets currently expect.
He later tried to play off the comments as a warning about what could happen not a forecast and to be fair, he did emphasize the word ‘could’.
(The video is queued up at the key point:)
His comments sparked a rally in sterling and GBP/USD peaked shortly afterward at 1.7191. Analysts rushed to move up rate hike forecasts with RBS saying the BOE would move in February.
The thing is, Mark Carney isn’t a good economic forecaster and never has been.
Today we found out inflation is at the lowest since 2009 and cable plunged to 1.5936. RBS just pushed its rate-hike forecast to August.