Bank of England’s Pill: We should not have slowed QT bond salesChief economist Huw Pill said “consistency” was key to the Bank of England’s quantitative tightening programme (Photo by: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)The Bank of England’s chief economist has hit out at colleagues’ recent decision to slow sales of the central bank’s government debt stockpile, warning it risked papering over underlying drivers of spiking government borrowing costs and causing a “more painful” crisis in the future. Seven committee members voted to reduce the speed of sales from £100bn to £70bn over the next year, while external member Catherine Mann called for an even slower reduction of £62bn. Bank of England QT programme costing Treasury billionsPill opted to maintain the current £100bn rundown in the face of these moves; a choice that would have involved a sharp uptick in the number of active bond sales and made the UK even more of an international outlier. “Slowing QT is a temporary and indirect palliative, likely dominated in terms of effectiveness by other tools,” he said. The sales have been carried out at huge losses, which the Treasury has been forced to plug using taxpayer money.