Mark CarneyREUTERS/Guadalupe PardoBank of England's Governor Mark Carney gestures during the "Debate on the Global Economy" session during the 2015 IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings in Lima, Peru, October 8, 2015.
The Bank of England has voted to keep interest rates on hold once again in its December meeting — as analysts had expected.
The BoE has been on hold as far as interest rates are concerned since March 2009, when the monetary policy committee cut Bank Rate to 0.5%.
Once again, a single member of the 9-person MPC voted for a 0.25 percentage point rate hike, and 8 voted to keep the rate where it is for now.
What markets are looking for is any signal of how close the Bank is to raising interest rates. UK unemployment is now at just 5.3%, the lowest since 2008 and far from its crisis-period peak above 8%.
Real wage growth has also returned, and most members of the MPC (except BoE chief economist Andy Haldane) are clear in suggesting that the next move from the Bank will be a rate hike, which will begin a steady tightening cycle, raising interest rates slowly. 
Despite the lower unemployment and returning wage growth, there's no sign of any inflation — due to plunging oil prices, consumer prices have been bobbing along at around zero growth for most of 2015. 
The minutes of the latest MPC meeting give a bit of an indication into their thinking: Most notably, they say that pay growth appears to have plateaued. That could mean holding interest rates lower for even longer. 
After touching 1.52 to the dollar earlier in the day, the pound reacted a little after the announcement, slipping less than a cent downwards:
GBP USDInvesting.com

NOW WATCH: How the buying power of your dollar has changed over the past 60 years