Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news and analysis.

Good afternoon, today is Thursday, August 1stst and I'm your host Kim Kong.

Our top story so far. The Bank of England joins the bandwagon.

The old lady of Threadneedles Street cut interest rates by a quarter point to 5%

after a meeting that was far from a foregone conclusion.

Economists had priced in 60-40 odds that the BOE would lower rates, but few would have

been surprised if the monetary policy committee, Hawks, had swung the decision.

That was evidenced in the NPC's close five to four vote to cut.

Michael Brown, senior strategist at Pepperstone, said looking ahead a relatively gradual

quarterly pace of cuts seems most plausible for the old lady with further

normalization likely to coincide with meetings at which a monetary policy report is published, leaving the base case

as just one more cut this year at the November meeting. U.S. Treasury yields fell

as the BOE joined the global monetary easing trend, the 10-year yield fell below 4% for the first time in six months,

a day after Fed Chairman J. Powell said a cut in September was on the table provided more good data arrived.

While the markets have been confident about a September Fed cut for a while,

they are now pricing in a 20% chance that it could cut by 50 basis points.

Society General FX strategist Kit Jukes notes that the

FOMC pretty much has to cut every meeting this year to keep up with market

expectations. That pricing against a backdrop of an economy that is growing

reasonably fast, a labor market that is unambiguously tight, and an equity market that

goes around smiling all the time is a recipe for the kind of disappointment my colleague

Albert Edwards who is a noted bear dreams about juke said we're only going to get

...