Throughout the course of last week, sterling was supported after Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, ruled out negative interest rates at the next monetary policy meeting. Positivity surrounding the vaccine rollout also helped the pound.
On Wednesday this week, Andrew Bailey will speak again ahead of the monetary policy meeting in February. There will also be a raft of economic data releases on Friday, including PMI figures, retail sales and consumer confidence data, which will all give a strong indication of how the UK economy performed in December and January.
GDP data was released at the end of last week, revealing that Britain’s economy shrank by 8.9% year-on-year in November 2020, the most since July and compared with market expectations of a 12.1% contraction. This was due to the second national lockdown which increased restrictions on businesses and individuals.
