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The Bank of England was meeting to discuss its programme of printing money against a backdrop of rising confidence among UK consumers.
The monetary policy committee will decide tomorrow at the end of its two-day meeting if it will extend quantitative easing beyond the £125 billion of extra money already printed.
Pressure is mounting on the Bank to raise at least £150 billion amid signs businesses remained starved of the money needed to stimulate a recovery in the economy.
But figures from the Nationwide Building Society today showed consumer confidence edged up last month driven in part by expectations of higher house prices and an end to the economic downturn.
Nationwide's headline consumer confidence index rose to 60 from an upwardly revised 59 in June.
The index is well above the level of 49 recorded in July last year and a series low of 44 in January, but significantly below the levels of over 90 typical before the impact of the credit crunch in late 2007.
“Consumer confidence remained broadly stable in July, with limited overall change in sentiment from the previous month,” said Nationwide chief economist Martin Gahbauer. “The significance of this stability is that consumers appear to be remaining cautious, but not panicked by the economic climate.
“The most significant changes this month are that confidence in spending has fallen and that for the first time for over a year, consumers expect the value of their homes to rise over the next six months.”
Reader views (1)
The rise in public confidence due to a higher rate of consumer spending is, maybe, due to the fact that it is"holiday time" when people have more money in their pockets for shopping, and more people are staying at home this year so the money they would have spent abroad is being spent at home. Perhaps? My view is that the economy is now "J" shaped and having been on a a dive is now bottoming out so we are now experiencing a slight turn upwards. But the letter "J" comes to a full stop after the brief curl upwards. October will see the full stop when people will v=cut their brief spending surge and, instead of "keeping up with the Jones's" will start "keeping DOWN with the Jones's." The worse is yet to come.
- Albert Hall, hove england, 05/08/2009 08:13
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