RUSHES: Bank of England press conference

Bank of England press conference; ENGLAND: London: Bank of England:INTClare Lombardelli (Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy, Bank of England), Andrew Bailey (Governor of Bank of England), Katie Martin (Head of Media and Stakeholder Engagement) and Dave Ramsden (Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking) press conference question and answer session SOT Q: In your statement, you said that interest rates are still on a downward path. Are they definitely still on a downward path?Andrew Bailey (Governor of Bank of England) answering question SOT A: Yes. What I would say, Faisal, on that is that I do think the path continues to be downward.There are all sorts of I mean, we've included a box on Restrictiveness. There are all sorts of views onwhere the neutral rate might be. I'm in the camp of people who sort of thinks that's rather toouncertain to speculate on, but I think it's very important to sort of talk about, you know, the wholeidea of restrictiveness. And we've put a lot in there about how we assess it.And I do think policy is still restrictive, even when we say we're past the peak, of course, that's acomment on, if you like, on the level, as it were, not the direction might be sort of be less restrictive,but the level can still be and is still restrictive. So,I do think that what I will say and you saw it in my opening remarks, I hope I've heard it, is that, there is, however, genuine uncertainty now about the course of that direction of rates. I'll be honest with you and the point I was making is that I think that the path has become more uncertain because of what we're seeing. You know, we're telling a story here, really, that we've got an upside risk, which is which is really a sort of, you know, can be more directly mapped into inflation. It goes to the previous two questions, actually, but we've got a downside risk, which of course gets to inflation via, you know, weaker activity weaker labour market story. And we are balancing th...