Greene (Friday, 10:15 AM)

What are you looking toward as you head into the May [Monetary Policy Committee] meeting in two weeks?

We know growth is weak… I’m a little bit more worried about the supply side actually… we’ve had really weak productivity growth in the UK… So if the supply side is constrained... that ends up being inflationary—and so I am worried about that on the domestic policy front.

Megan Greene External Member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England

Josh Lipsky

The UK's biggest single country trading partner is the US, but its biggest trading partner overall is actually the EU, and so what's going on in the US and the EU is quite important for the UK economy. On the EU side… that should be a bit of a tailwind for the UK.

Normally if the US were to impose tariffs on the UK, you would expect the US dollar to appreciate. It hasn't in fact happened. In fact, the opposite has happened… I really think it's too early to say what's going to happen with the dollar.

Particularly around tariffs, I think the risk is now on the disinflationary side, so I think that tariffs on the UK would on net be more disinflationary… so that is a challenge, but it's in the risk space given that we don't quite know what tariffs are going to look like in the end.

So what we've seen is that we should see the fiscal policy contribute less to growth over the forecast period, but it's still contributing to growth.

Josh Lipsky

Can you walk through the uncertainties, because we just talked about the UK situation and the different crosswinds, but there are other headwinds.

Josh Lipsky

You're not seeing anything from your perspective that's driving… a change in what you previously thought in terms of the rate path?

Josh Lipsky

How do you factor this in… this new government here in the UK has come in with their own set of policy priorities, which are obviously impacting the economy?

Megan Greene External Member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England