UK government names Megan Greene to join Bank of England rate committee

LONDON, April 11 (Reuters) - Britain's finance ministry named Megan Greene, the global chief economist at Kroll, on Tuesday to succeed Silvana Tenreyro on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) after Tenreyro's term ends in July.

"Megan Greene's wide experience across financial markets and the real economy will bring valuable new expertise to the MPC," finance minister Jeremy Hunt said.

Greene was previously global chief economist at Manulife Asset Management and is a senior fellow at Brown University in the United States and Britain's Chatham House think tank.

Tenreyro, a professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), joined the MPC in July 2017 and will soon have completed her second three-year term, the maximum for an external member of the committee.

She is one of the most dovish BoE rate setters and has voted against raising interest rates since last December.

The BoE has raised interest rates 11 times since December 2021, taking rates to 4.25% from 0.1% as it has tried to keep a lid on inflation and return it to its 2% target.

Before Greene, the most recent appointee to the nine-member MPC was another LSE academic, Swati Dhingra, who joined the MPC in August 2022 and has also voted against recent rate rises.

Dhingra replaced former Citi economist Michael Saunders, who voted for faster rate rises than most other policymakers in the first half of 2022.

Consumer price inflation peaked at a 41-year high of 11.1% in October and was still in double digits when February data was released last month. The BoE expects CPI to fall sharply in the current quarter and to be below 4% by the end of this year.