Should the Bank of England have raised rates earlier? Or left the decision until next year? It's all academic now. Last week the Bank of England raised the base rate from 0.1% to 0.25% - very festive for inflation hawks but not perhaps for anyone else as MoneySavingExpert reports.
There are some interesting arguments of course. The first is about the nature of the inflation – is it transitory or something much longer term? Clearly the big factors driving it are mostly outside the control of the domestic central bank – in other words from energy prices and supply chain constraints and bottlenecks.
The risk is that this feeds into wage demands and in a tight labour market, this then embeds more inflation. The worst case is a wage price spiral.
Each point is, of course, subject to heated debate among economists. The MPC minutes may be of use to understand the bank's thinking where they appear, among other things, to be prepared to look through the Omicron outbreak.
Advisers will likely find themselves increasingly discussing the inflation spike which led to the decision. The inflation rate jumped to 5.1 per cent in terms of CPI earlier last week with talk of stagflation. The very unfashionable RPI is at an eyewatering 7.1 per cent.
Investment Week reports that ‘investors’ are preparing for the end of the bond buying programme, i.e. a wind down of quantitative easing in the context of the Federal Reserve accelerating the tapering of its own bond buying programme.
Money Marketing asks in its essay whether the advice sector needs to work harder to tackle poor advice. The answer is almost always – yes poorly run firms should. But it remains difficult to see what well run firms can do.
FCA-regulated asset managers and asset owners - including life insurers and pension providers - will have to disclose how they take climate-related risks and opportunities into account in managing their investments from January.
Things do appear to moving rapidly at least on the disclosure front.
Canadian-owned Canaccord Genuity buys Punter Southall Wealth including Psigma for a princely £164 million.
