The Bank of England will probably try on Thursday to keep a lid on expectations that Britains economy is heading for a strong, vaccineboosted recovery after suffering its worst crash in three centuries last year.

The central bank is not expected to change its huge, crisisfighting stimulus programme at 1200 GMT, after its March policy meetings.

Instead, investors will be trying to gauge how confident it is that Europes fastest COVID19 vaccination campaign and yet more spending and tax cuts in finance minister Rishi Sunaks March 3 budget will trigger a bounceback in the months ahead.

BoE Governor Andrew Bailey said on Monday he was more optimistic about the recovery. But he stressed his view came with a large dose of caution with Britain still in the grip of a third lockdown and facing the risk of new COVID19 variants.

The health service warned on Wednesday of a big reduction in available vaccines from March 29.

Bailey also said a jump in interest rates in financial markets from almost recordlow levels was consistent with the better outlook, suggesting he was not worried about investors pricing in BoE rate hikes starting next year.

On Wednesday, rate futures markets saw an 80 chance of a single increase in Bank Rate to 0.25 by September 2022 from its current alltime low of 0.1.

Sterling has been the secondstrongest performer against the U.S. dollar this year among the socalled G10 currencies.

But Deutsche Bank economist Sanjay Raja said speculation that the BoE…