LONDON, June 24 (Reuters) - The latest signs on the economy have been encouraging but the jury is still out on whether recovery is in the bag, Bank of England policymakers said on Wednesday.
Speaking before parliament's Treasury Committee, BoE Governor Mervyn King said that just because he was talking about exit strategies from the huge stimulus being put into the economy did not mean he was on the verge of raising interest rates.
He said the big picture outlook had not changed since the MPC made its May forecasts which showed inflation well below target even with the current degree of planned stimulus.
"If you withdraw stimulus too quickly, you run the risk that the dowturn will resume. Equally of course, we need to be very careful not to allow the stimulus to reach the point at which inflation takes off," King said.
Other MPC members also expressed scepticism that the latest data should be read as a sign that the economy was coming firmly out of recession.
"There's a considerable degree of uncertainty about the strength of the upturn, not just here but around the world," BoE Deputy Governor Charles Bean told the committee.
MPC member Kate Barker said she agreed with Bean's view. "To some extent the jury is still out," she said. "It certainly remains vulnerable to shocks, the financial system remains vulnerable."
Her colleague Andrew Sentance said that the economy may be bottoming out.
"I'd think I'd see this as evidence that the economy is reaching some sort of bottom of the fall in output. I would expect that to be followed by recovery in output, I think the question is we can't say how strong that's going to be," he said.
(Reporting by Sumeet Desai, David Milliken, Fiona Shaikh and Matt Falloon; editing by Stephen Nisbet)