Investing.com - The Bank of England said on Thursday it was leaving interest rates on hold at record lows at the conclusion of its final monetary policy meeting of 2016.
The BoE said its nine member monetary policy committee was unanimous in the decision to keep interest rates at a record low of 0.25%.
Policymakers also voted 9-0 to keep the bank's bond-buying program target at £435 billion and to continue with its new plan to buy up to £10 billion of corporate bonds.
The bank expects inflation to rise to its 2% target within six months.
The appreciation in sterling and the increase in oil prices since the banks last meeting are expected to result a slightly lower path for inflation than envisaged in the November inflation report, the meeting minutes said.
The bank still feels inflation is likely to overshoot the target later in 2017 and through 2018.
The bank noted that there are limits to the extent to which above-target inflation can be tolerated.
Those limits depend on the cause of the inflation overshoot, the extent of second-round effects on domestic costs, the evolution of inflation expectations, and the scale of the shortfall in economic activity below potential the bank said.
Data on Tuesday showed that the rate of inflation in the UK jumped to a two-year high of 1.2% in November from a year earlier as the sharp fall in the pound since the vote to leave the European Union fed through into prices.
Another report on Wednesday showed that employment in the UK fell for the first time since the EU referendum.