(Bloomberg) -- Central banks acted too late to tame inflation and may now have to raise interest rates too aggressively simply to restore their credibility, according to Jim O’Neill, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief economist and ex-U.K. government minister.

Speaking to lawmakers on Monday, O’Neill said officials don’t “have the slightest idea what has really happened or what is going on” with surging inflation because it is about “a lot of complex forces.”

“It’s quite clear the Bank of England and others should not have behaved as they did in the past two years,” he told Parliament’s Treasury Committee, in a reference to central banks’ massive quantitative-easing programs. “They might go completely the wrong way too much, just to get their credibility back.”

O’Neill, who made his name at Goldman more than 20 years ago for predicting the rise of the BRICs –- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- was addressing Members of Parliament about the cost of living crisis engulfing the U.K. and other countries.

In the U.S., U.K. and across Europe, inflation has hit 30-year highs as supply bottlenecks and job shortages drive up costs and spark concerns about a self-reinforcing wage-price spiral. O’Neill said he would have started raising rates well before the BOE did in December.

He said BOE Governor Andrew Bailey’s recent remark that people should not ask for big pay rises despite soaring living costs was “understandably sensitive” for many workers. That’s particularly true when set against the BOE’s 895 billion-pound ($1.2 trillion) QE program, which “appears to have been most influential on financial conditions -– which is perceived as widening inequality,” he added.

“The whole framework of inflation targeting has outlived its sell-by date, certainly the whole persistent quantitative-easing approach,” O’Neill said.

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