JACOB Rees-Mogg has attacked the BBC as he moved to blame the Bank of England for Britain's economic chaos. 

The business minister said the broadcaster's linking of the government's mini-budget and its £45bn of unfunded tax cuts to the turmoil in the markets risked breaching impartiality guidelines.

However, a number of experts rejected that analysis and said Kwasi Kwarteng's fiscal statement was a "self-inflicted wound."

Mr Rees-Mogg was speaking as new official figures showed the economy unexpectedly contracted by 0.3% in August, due to a slowdown in factories and consumer-facing businesses.

Meanwhile, the pound plummeted last night after Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England insisted there would be no more interventions to bail out pension funds when the current scheme ends on Friday.

However, it rallied this morning after the Financial Times reported the bank had told bankers privately that the facility could be extended if market conditions demanded it.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Rees-Mogg said global factors were to blame for the fall in the pound in the immediate aftermath of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget.

Mr Rees-Mogg told the presenter: “You suggest something is causal, which is a speculation.

“What has caused the effect in pension funds, because of some quite high-risk but low-probability investment strategies, is not necessarily the mini-budget – it could just as easily be the fact that, the day before, the Bank of England did not raise interest rates as much as the Federal Reserve did.

“And I think jumping to conclusions about causality is not meeting the BBC’s requirement for impartiality, it is a commentary rather than a factual question.”

He added: “I’m saying it’s primarily caused by interest rate differentials rather than by the fiscal announcement.”

The minister said the crisis had been fuelled, in part, by the "high risk but low-probability investment strategies" of pension funds rather than the mini-budget.

"It could just as easily be the fact that the day before the Bank of England did not raise interest rates as much as the (US) Federal Reserve did,” he added.

Mr Rees-Mogg said the mini-budget’s announcements as a percentage of GDP were “not that enormous” and “not out of the run of the mill of events that come before Parliament”.

The market response was “much more to do with interest rates than it is to do with a minor part of fiscal policy”.

Mr Rees-Mogg’s analysis was rejected by a number of experts. 

On September 22 the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) raised rates by 0.5 percentage points to 2.25% – the highest since December 2008.

The day before, America’s Federal Reserve raised rates by 0.75 percentage points, taking its benchmark rate to a range of 3% to 3.25%.

Lucy Coutts, investment director at wealth management firm JM Finn, said the market reaction was a “self-inflicted wound” as a result of the mini-budget.

She told Today that bond yields were rising because there is “so much uncertainty about the fiscal policy of the Government”.

Nigel Peaple, director of policy and advocacy at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, said: “The origin of these problems seems to have been caused mainly by the mini-budget, because of market reaction to that mini-budget, because of uncertainty about the Government’s plans.”

He suggested the markets could be calmed when the Chancellor sets out more details about how he intends to manage the public finances.

Christian Kopf, head of fixed income at German firm Union Investment, said the mini-budget is “absolutely” to blame.

He told Today: “The problem we are facing in the United Kingdom is the excessive current account deficit that the country is running, it exports much less than it imports, it saves much less than it invests and consumes, and the country is living beyond its means.

“The mini-budget that has been announced by the UK Government is only making matters worse by increasing that fiscal deficit and by increasing the current account deficit of the United Kingdom, and it got to a point where investors are unwilling to fund that.”

The Chancellor is due to come before MPs on Halloween to set out how the government will pay for the tax cuts and get the public finances back on track.

The SNP has urged him to bring the statement forward to this week.