Andrew Bailey’s evidence session was the opposite of reassuring

‘There are obviously lessons to be learned,’ said Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey at today’s House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. It was a point he repeated many times over, in reference to the inflation crisis that has plagued Britain for close to two years now. ‘We have to learn lessons from the experiences we’ve had, of course we must… We have to work out what those lessons are.’

But despite repeating this sentiment over and over again, Bailey could not meaningfully come up with one good example of such a lesson, nor could he go into much detail on the mistakes the Monetary Policy Committee has made over the past two years. Pressed multiple times by the committee about the Bank’s handling of rising prices – and its slow action on interest rates – Bailey simply kept insisting that hindsight could not be used to judge decisions that were made in the moment.