Bank of England Governor Mark Carney held a press conference following the U.K. central bank's decision to leave interest rates unchanged on Thursday.
Policymakers at Threadneedle Street voted 7-2 to keep rates on hold at 0.5 percent.
Carney said that the U.K. economy had not fulfilled projections laid out in the bank's February meeting. During that meeting, the bank signaled that interest rates could come earlier and may have to be larger than previously predicted.
Carney noted that one-off factors such as adverse weather conditions may have been a factor in a softening of economic growth at the start of the year. He said that the underlying pace of growth remained more resilient than headline data suggested.
The central bank's decision Thursday was mostly expected after Carney gave dovish comments in an interview with the BBC, saying that Brexit uncertainty could slow the pace of rate hikes.
Markets were pricing in less than a 10 percent probability of a rate rise being announced Thursday. The bank hiked interest rates for the first time in over a decade in November.
Since joining the bank in 2013, Carney's guidance on the path for interest rates has frequently been derailed by surprises in the economy. That prompted Pat McFadden, a lawmaker for the U.K.'s Labour Party, to call him an "unreliable boyfriend."
But on Thursday, Carney quipped that the only people who refer to him as an unreliable boyfriend are financial journalists.
