Letter and spirit

Mervyn King doesn’t want to make a big deal of UK inflation. The governor of the Bank of England had to write a letter on the topic to the Gordon Brown, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, because the consumer price index rose faster than 3% in the year though March. But King was reasonably confident that the pace of increase would soon move back towards the 2% target. That calm suits Brown, who is anxious that the country’s «decade of low and stable inflation», as he put it in his reply to Kin...