The Committee expects that the asset purchase programme to take another month to complete, and will review the scale of the programme again at its August meeting, alongside its latest inflation projections.
Barry Naisbitt, Chief Economist at Abbey said: "After several months of marching Bank Rate down and setting new records for how low Bank Rate could go, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has, in effect, run out of space to cut further. It is now operating its quantitative easing policy and watching the incoming economic data very carefully to see if it is tracking its expectation of the likely development of the recession. Some recent indicators, such as survey indicators of service sector output, are presenting a less downbeat picture of economic activity but the recent revisions to the GDP figures for the first quarter showed a sharper decline than first thought."
