The Bank of England should slow the pace of its costly approach to unwinding quantitative easing, which is pushing up government borrowing costs and weakening the public finances at a time when both are under significant pressure, several top economists have said. The calls follow the UK’s sovereign debt being swept up in a dramatic sell-off that carried the government’s long-term borrowing costs to their highest level this century. Simultaneously, Bank of England officials published a fresh paper in which they raised their estimate for the total cost to the taxpayer of reversing the Bank’s QE programme to £125bn. [...]