As far as most observers are concerned, Mark Carney’s speech at the Mansion House last Thursday boiled down to a single half sentence. The first rise in interest rates since July 2007 “could happen sooner than markets currently expect”, the Bank of England Governor uttered, to assembled City grandees and the wider world beyond. This sparked a frenzy of speculation that rates could start rising from their historic low of 0.5pc, where they’ve been since March 2009, sooner rather than later.
Before Thursday, the consensus expressed in bond and currency markets was that the first rate increase in almost seven years would happen early in the second quarter of 2015. Carney’s after-dinner bombshell changed that, with economists scrambling to update their forecasts.