The Bank of England looks set to call time on its quantitative easing (QE) programme.
Reports indicate that the bank feels it cannot afford to ignore Britain's, above-target inflation even though the country is back in recession.
The programme has seen the purchase of £325 billion of government debt with newly created money - £50 billion of which was purchased in the last three months
The decision to end so-called quantitative easing, or QE, is unlikely to be welcomed by Britain's Conservative-led coalition, which was battered in local elections on Thursday.
The UK government has relied on loose monetary policy to soften the pain from of austerity aimed at reducing Britain's massive public borrowing.
Gnawing at members of the Bank of England's nine-strong Monetary Policy Committee is the worry that they might have miscalculated when they forecast in February and earlier that inflation would be below their 2% target by the end of 2012.
Inflation unexpectedly rose for the first time in six months in March, touching 3.5%, the highest rate in the Group of Seven major advanced economies.
This leaves first-quarter inflation above the 3.35% forecast in February, making the expected fall to an average 3% in the second quarter more challenging. An upward revision to the bank's quarterly inflation forecasts is likely later this month.
"They're going to end up with an inflation profile that is substantially higher in the short-term," said Jens Larsen, a former BoE economist who now works at RBC. "The notion that there will be a significant undershoot is hard to believe."
A below-target forecast for inflation two-three years ahead was the formal justification for the BoE to start a second round of QE in October. In practice, worries about the euro zone debt crisis and weak growth drove the decision.
Britain slips back into recession
Official data last week showing that Britain's economy shrank 0.2% in the first three months of 2012 after a 0.3% decline at the end of 2011 might suggest these worries have not gone away.
But in minutes to its April policy meeting, the BoE said it was likely to overlook weak GDP data in the short-term as it believed that upbeat business surveys were more representative of the true health of the economy.
BoE Governor Mervyn King noted that inflation was "high" and that recovery was in view during the past week. Deputy governor Paul Tucker and external member Adam Posen - who was formerly a leading proponent of QE - both made public statements indicating that more QE was unlikely.
