DECISIONS · Settled
Will the Bank of England Bank Rate be cut at the 17 September 2026 meeting?
The answer: NO
The panel of 14 models averaged 30% YES; 12 of 14 were on the right side. The base rate when the panel was sealed: 10%.
THE BRIEF, WRITTEN AFTER THE OUTCOME
Bank Rate held, panel leaned higher than the crowd, two models nailed the NO
The Bank of England held Bank Rate at 3.75, so the answer was NO. The panel mean was 30% YES, above the crowd base rate of 10%. Two models, Gemini 2.5 Pro + web search and Perplexity Sonar, gave 3% YES and scored near-zero Briers. The strongest YES forecasts, GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash, were wrong with 66% and 60% respectively. Twelve of 14 panel models called the outcome.
- Outcome: NO, rate unchanged at 3.75 from before to after the meeting.
- Panel mean 30% YES, median 28% YES; crowd base rate 10% YES.
- Best Brier 0.001 by Gemini 2.5 Pro + web search and Perplexity Sonar at 3% YES.
- Highest forecasts were GPT-5 66% and Gemini 2.5 Flash 60%, both called NO incorrectly.
- Twelve of 14 panel models called the outcome (i.e. predicted NO).
EVERY FORECAST, HIGHEST FIRST
- GPT-566%
- Gemini 2.5 Flash60%
- Llama 4 Maverick42%
- DeepSeek V340%
- Mistral Large40%
- Kimi K235%
- Grok 4.528%
- GPT-5 Mini28%
- Claude Opus 4.128%
- Claude Sonnet 4.525%
- Perplexity Sonar Pro9%
- Gemini 2.5 Pro8%
- Perplexity Sonar3%
- Gemini 2.5 Pro + web search3%