In the UK parliament’s Treasury Committee hearing, BoE Governor Andrew Bailey said, there was “very clearly an upside risk” inflation that “comes through from the second-round effects”.
“The second-round effects are a real concern. If we get the second-round effects… of course we would need to react to that with higher interest rates… ,” he warned. “And the consequence of that… is that it would of course slow activity in the economy and it would increase unemployment”
On off-loading the balance sheet, Bailey said, “what we said last August was that if and when Bank Rate reaches 1%, and the words are important here, we will begin to consider active sales. It’s not the same sort of quasi automatic process that we had with the ceasing reinvestment. So the 1% is a necessary but not sufficient thing. We would want to conduct QT at times when its impact on monetary policy was least.”
