The Bank of England announced Thursday that it would spend another 50 billion pounds (85 billion U.S. dollars) of new money to buy bonds in an attempt to help the British economy out of recession.
Britain's central bank also said it would hold the interest rates unchanged at a historic low of 0.5 percent.
The move will raise the bank's quantitative-easing (QE) program from 125 billion pounds (212 billion dollars) to 175 billion pounds (297 billion dollars).
This is beyond the British Treasury's permission of 150 billion pounds (255 billion dollars), which means Mervyn King, Governor of the bank, will need approval from the Treasury for the expansion.
The decision is beyond expectations of economists, some of whom had forecast that the bank would halt the expansion of the QE program as "green shoots" have begun to emerge in the British economy.
The bank said in a statement that the recession "appears to have been deeper than previously thought."
The bank's monetary policy committee "expects the announced program to take another three months to complete," the statement said. It added that the "scale of the program will be kept under review."
Latest official data show the British economy shrank 5.6 percent in the second quarter of this year compared with the same quarter of last year, the biggest drop since quarterly records began in 1955.
In order to lift the economy out of the downturn at an early date, the central bank launched an unprecedented QE program in March and cut its interest rates to a record low.
Source: Xinhua
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