BoE's Mann: Hard to say never about negative interest rates

Catherine Mann, the newest member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, said on Monday that they don't know enough about how financial volatility from exiting the quantitative easing programme could affect the economy, per Reuters.

Additional takeaways

"Hard to say never about negative interest rates."

"Research shows negative rates are often deployed too late to help economies."

"It's very hard to say negative interest rates, or further QE, would be right policy move now."

"US monetary policy normalization is likely to be sooner than other advanced economies including the UK."

"BoE will need to be conscious about spillover from the US policy tightening."

"US normalization of policy could make it less urgent for BoE to tighten policy too."

"Additional mutations of COVID have generated more concern."

Market reaction

The GBP/USD remains on the back foot following these comments and was last seen losing 0.7% on the day at 1.3675.