Inflation-wary Bank of England to halt money-printing press

LON

LONDON (Reuters) - The Bank of England looks set to call a halt to its asset-buying program on Thursday, despite the economy having slipped into recession and renewed risks rising from the euro zone debt crisis, as UK inflation remains stubbornly high.

LONDON (Reuters) - The Bank of England looks set to call a halt to its asset-buying program on Thursday, despite the economy having slipped into recession and renewed risks rising from the euro zone debt crisis, as UK inflation remains stubbornly high.

The Bank of England looks set to call a halt to its asset-buying program on Thursday, despite the economy having slipped into recession and renewed risks rising from the euro zone debt crisis, as UK inflation ...

The Bank of England looks set to call a halt to its asset-buying program on Thursday, despite the economy having slipped into recession and renewed risks rising from the euro zone debt crisis, as UK inflation ...

IT REALLY is difficult to overstate the extent of the European Central Bank's failure in recent months. Earlier this year, headline inflation rose in Europe behind rising commodity prices. The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve considered the increase in inflation, looked at emerging market efforts to tighten policy, tightening fiscal conditions in their economies, and general economic weakness and concluded that the bump would be short-lived. It's not going too far to say that it was obvious they would be short-lived.

I'd LIKE to say a bit more about the policy side of things given the state of the world economy. There is a great deal of attention paid to fiscal issues, and certainly fiscal issues deserve scrutiny. Greece, Ireland, and Portugal have little choice but to embrace swingeing short-term austerity, but massive short-term cuts in places like Spain and Italy are foolish and counterproductive.

Despite being told last week of the successful solution that the politicians of Portugal had procured - and thusly seeing Portuguese bonds and stocks surge in a renewed bluster of hope and faith that all is well again; it seems that, shocker, nothing is fixed. As Reuters reports, Portugal's political crisis re-deepened today after the President rejected a plan to heal a government rift and critics accused him of igniting a "time-bomb' by calling for early elections.