BoE comments from Phoebus Software

30 September 2022

“The Bank of England figures are significant on their own but when put in the context of what has happened in the past week since the mini-budget, there were already warning signs. Mortgage approvals increased enormously in August, but we need to hope those approvals got to offer stage before lenders pulled those rates in the past week, as many of the people who thought in August that their mortgage was sorted would now find that they had to pay two or three percentage points more than they were expecting. Interest rates already rose 22 basis points in August but this pales into insignificance when looking at the 90bp that they rose in just one day at one point on Tuesday.

“What the country is crying out for is for the government to produce a well costed, fiscally responsible budget that will steady the markets and reduce the need for such huge rate rises. We all have to hope that today’s meeting between the Prime Minister and the OBR can produce that and that the government will act before the end of November, or September’s stats will read in a way not seen since the credit crunch in 2007.”