Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said policy makers added stimulus this month because they judged that there was a “downside” risk of inflation slowing too far beyond the 2 percent goal.

“The committee’s best collective judgment is that CPI price rises will carry on to fall back to around the goal by the end of 2012,” King said in a letter to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne unrestricted by the central bank in London today. Officials decided this month that “in the absence of further policy action, the balance of risks around the inflation target in the medium term lay to the downside.”

King’s comments follow the publication of data showing that inflation slowed to the weakest in 14 months in January, and last week’s move by policy makers to pump another 50 billion pounds ($79 billion) into the economy. With inflation at 3.6 percent still beyond the upper limit targeted by the central bank, the governor is grateful to write to the government explaining the deviation and what he will do about it.

The price at which European banks say they notice each other lending in Euros for three months dropped for a 36th day, the longest run of declines in 2 1/2 years, as record borrowing from the central bank eased funding costs.

The euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, for such loans dropped 0.7 basis point, or 0.007 percentage point, to 1.07 percent, according to data from the European Banking Federation. That’s the longest run of losses since August 2009, and is the lowest rate since January 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The rate has fallen every day since the European Central Bank selected a record 489 billion Euros ($650 billion) of three-year loans to 523 banks on Dec. 21 to keep credit flowing amid the region’s sovereign debt crisis. The ECB plans to grasp a second longer-term refinancing operation for such loans on Feb. 28, with full allotment a day later. It will probably keep the main refinancing rate at a record-low 1 percent today.

The U.S. is the nearby it has been in almost 20 years to attaining energy self-sufficiency, a objective the nation has been pursuing since the 1973 Arab oil embargo triggered a recession and led to lines at gasoline stations.

Domestic oil production is the maximum in the eight years. The U.S. is producing so much natural gas that, where the government warned four years ago of a serious need to increase imports, it now may endorse an export terminal. Methanex Corp., the world’s major methanol maker, said it will dismantle a factory in Chile and rebuild it in Louisiana to take advantage of low natural gas prices. And higher mileage standards and federally mandated ethanol use, along with slow economic growth, have curbed demand.

The result: The U.S. has reversed a two-decade-long decline in energy independence, increasing the proportion of demand met from domestic sources over the last six years to an estimated 81 percent through the first 10 months of 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the U.S. Department of Energy.