Bank of England governor Mervyn King has repeated an earlier call for more quantitative easing stimulus cash, minutes of a recent policy meeting showed on Wednesday.
The BoE’s nine-member Monetary Policy Committee voted 6-3 to keep its QE cash stimulus amount at £375 billion ($568 billion, 439 billion euros), repeating January’s voting pattern, according to minutes from their February 6-7 gathering.
For the second month in a row, outgoing boss King was joined by fellow MPC members David Miles and Paul Fisher in calling for an extra £25 billion in stimulus cash as Britain faced the prospect of its third recession in less than five years.
The minutes were published ahead of the government’s 2013/2014 annual budget announcement, which was due at 1230 GMT.
Markets were waiting to see whether British finance minister George Osborne uses the budget to announce changes to the BoE’s inflation target to boost an economy.
The chancellor traditionally uses the budget to state the central bank’s policy mandate, which for many years has been to meet a government-set annual inflation target of 2.0 percent.
Incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney, the Canadian central bank chief who takes up his role in July, has previously suggested that economic output might be a better target measure than inflation.
On Wednesday official data showed British 12-month inflation rose to 2.8 percent in February on the back of rising domestic energy costs and transport prices.
BoE boss calls for more stimulus
