You not only have different Bank of England figures singing different tunes, but different data points indicating different things and now, even the same data point indicating different things after it has been revised.
Namely, the big one; gross domestic product. Yesterday UK GDP was revised up from a not insignificant 2.4% to a decidedly punchy 2.9%. A raise of 0.5% may not seem a lot but if you express it as a percentage of itself – a 20% rise- you get a greater sense of how much better the economy has done than initially thought.
Senior figures within the Bank of England also seem to say different things depending on when you talk to them and which one it is.
Yesterday the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane made some very dovish public comments, even alluding to the possibility of an interest rate cut down to 0.25%. He warned that the ‘an early lift-off could be self-defeating’.
The timing was particularly curious given the sizable upgrade to the GDP numbers and the fact that the ONS also reported a rise in wage growth.
Perhaps all the uncertainty over Greece and the UK referendum on EU membership has spooked Haldane, as it has some others.
