What’s happened?
Another month, another set of painful UK inflation statistics that were worse than analysts had predicted. The consensus view of economists polled by Reuters had been that inflation would fall a little in May to 8.4%. Instead, when the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) figure was published last week, it showed the UK’s ominously sticky inflation rate was unchanged on the previous month at 8.7%. Even more worrying was the latest figure on “core” inflation, which strips out volatile components that the Bank of England can’t do much to influence, principally food and energy costs. For the second month in a row, core inflation
