Bank of England chief says UK to underperform until mid-2016

LONDON – Bank of England Governor Mark Carney says the British economy is likely to grow slower than its peers in the Group of Seven until the middle of next year.

In a speech at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Carney said Monday that uncertainty over Britain's exit from the European Union will weigh on the British economy, with growth "set to remain weaker than the G-7 average until mid-2018."

That's a rare experience for an economy that's outperformed the average of its peers in the G-7 — Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and the U.S. — for much of the past three decades. The only times it's underperformed, Carney said, was in the depths of the global financial crisis and following the collapse of a boom in the late 1980s.