The Bank’s never had more than one measure of underlying inflation serving as its operational guide until the 2016 renewal agreement. Moving to three new core measures, none of which exclude the mortgage interest component, with the 2016 renewal agreement, was an incredibly poor decision. (Mortgage interest costs decreased by 0.4% over 12 months in January as opposed to 0.3% in December.) Even so, one of the new measures, CPI-median, was at 1.9%, just below the target rate. These dysfunctional measures seem to have been brought in just to protect the Bank’s low-interest-rate policies if there was a spike in inflation such as we are now seeing.