The British Retail Consortium, the lobby group for high street shops, said more of consumers’ monthly salaries were being swallowed up by higher prices for food, leaving little cash leftover to spend on other items. Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the BRC, said consumers wanted to spend but “they just don’t have the resources to do so”. As a rule of thumb, times of high inflation are good for borrowers and bad for investors. The government's preferred measure of inflation, and the one the Bank of England takes into account when setting interest rates, is the consumer price index (CPI). He said: “The BoE seems keen to normalise interest rates even if output growth is below levels it would normally like to see when tightening policy.

Source: The Guardian March 06, 2018 06:00 UTC