Interest Rates and Business Returns

The July interest rate increase has taken the Bank of England's Base Rate to the highest value for six years. In figure 1 we show the forward estimates for the nominal short-term interest rate taken from the Bank of England's yield curve tables for both government debt and liabilities of commercial banks. These are in effect market forecasts of the short-term rate produced in the past. The graph shows that the market has been taken somewhat by surprise by rising short-term interest rates. Two years ago the market was forecasting a rate of around 4 per cent per annum for July 2007. Nor were the probabilities the market gave to an interest rate of 5.75 per cent per annum very high. Twelve months ago the market in financial options implied that the chance of the rate exceeding 5.66 per cent per annum was only 15 per cent. Even in January of this year the chance of it reaching its current level or higher was put at less than 25 per cent. The National Institute cannot claim a substantially better record at forecasting interest rates. We normally use market expectations, as calculated from the yield curve, to provide exogenous forecasts as input into our model in the short term.