What’s going on? Interest rates are heading nowhere during the summer, that’s what...

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,” Nobel laureate Niels Bohr once wisely observed. But pity the Bank of England’s deputy governor Dave Ramsden, who couldn’t really have expected his confident assertions on the temporary nature of the blip suffered by the UK economy at the beginning of this year to begin to unravel within a matter of days. Who’d be a central banker?

Sir Dave, in a speech entitled “What’s going on?” (answer: we’re not really sure), offered up a huge hostage to fortune a week ago when he said the “data we have had so far suggests our interpretation of the slowdown as temporary looks to be being borne out”. The Monetary Policy Committee’s May stance – wait and see for data to pick up and then raise rates – “looks on track”.

Derailment arrived just five days later in the form of the latest messy industrial production figures, which showed no sign of a bounceback from a snow-ravaged March: construction struggled almost as much as manufacturers. Labour market figures meanwhile showed a surprise slowdown in wage growth, which the Bank is monitoring for fear of it feeding into inflation.

Sir Dave, in fairness, had some interesting things to say about “what’s going on” with persistently weak wage growth. He highlighted possible influences such as the increased “Uberisation” of an atomised workforce, as well as potential Brexit caution among employers, and lags between falling unemployment and rising wages: job switchers tend to get bigger pay rises than stayers.

But despite the regular hailing of record employment by the political classes, there are warning signs — and have been all year — of more slack in the jobs market than the headline figures suggest. For example, the number of part-time workers who want a full-time job has been falling steadily for the past five years but has levelled off and remained stable in the latest quarter, according to the Office for National Statistics. And while the employment rate is heading into the stratosphere, this week’s figures show firms cutting back on hours. Full-time staff worked 36.9 hours a week in the quarter to April on average, the lowest for seven years.

The data this week might just be another “blip”. But when regular private sector pay is growing at just 2.5% (if you get a pay rise at all) the Bank needs to exercise more caution and see if the softer numbers develop into a trend. After all, rate-setters said they would be data-dependent when they held fire in May. The Bank has consistently over-estimated annual pay growth in recent years and more weak numbers will put its latest estimate of 2.75% in doubt. Moreover, in the context of a slowing global economy and the latest Brexit paroxysms this week, there is no need for the Bank to raise rates this summer, particularly as it won’t have access to any official evidence of overall second-quarter recovery from the ONS before it makes the decision.

Markets have given their own verdict: from a 70% chance of a hike a couple of weeks ago, the August meeting is now a coin-flip. Rather than Sir Dave’s stance, I prefer the more cautious tone struck by his Monetary Policy Committee colleague Silvana Tenreyro; she said last week that rate rises would be needed but the timing “is an open question”. The answer to that question increasingly points towards November, rather than August.