LONDON (Reuters) -Bank of England Chief Economist Huw Pill said on Wednesday that central bankers needed to make a “clear and credible” commitment to controlling inflation, including responding firmly if inflation gets out of hand.
Pill – who voted against the BoE’s most recent rate cut to 4% in August – said a speech he was giving at the University of Birmingham was not intended to be a comment on the current stance of monetary policy or the economic outlook.
But he said he backed what he called a “conservative” approach to setting interest rates.
“More weight should be given to robust ‘eternal verities’ in running monetary policy, at the expense of pursuing fragile optimising approaches specific to a given set of often ephemeral circumstances,” he said in a text of the speech released