Monthly Archives: December 2017

As the blog hangs up its stocking and takes a well-earned festive break, we leave you with our annual Christmas brain-teaser. Perhaps the greatest only central bank themed festive quiz on the planet. Have a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and we’ll see you in January… Continue reading →

As the year draws to a close, we wanted to take a quick but nostalgic look back at the past twelve months on the blog. It’s been our best year to date in terms of hits, and in September we notched up our one millionth view. Here are our ten most popular posts of 2017, as measured by number of views, just in case you missed them first time round…

What could falls in sterling mean for UK firms’ ability to sustain foreign currency (FX) debt obligations? The value of sterling began falling around two years ago and dropped further after the EU referendum – remaining around these lower values ever since. There is every possibility that sterling may stay low for the foreseeable future – creating both potential winners and losers. In this piece, I investigate one particular channel for losses related to sterling weakness: whether UK firms could find meeting their FX debt obligations more challenging. By reviewing market intelligence, market prices and derivatives databases, I find limited evidence that sterling weakness has yet produced any significant changes to UK firms’ ability to manage their FX debt obligations.

Imagine if you could peek inside the Bank’s historical ledgers and see the array of interest rates the Bank has charged for emergency loans in the past. If you could get the inside scoop on how many of these loans were never repaid, and how that impacted the Bank’s bottom line? Now you can. We have transcribed the Bank’s daily transactional ledgers and put them into an Excel workbook for you to explore. These ledgers contain a wealth of information on everyone who asked the Bank for a loan during the 1847, 1857 and 1866 crises.

In 2016 the UK’s current account deficit was 5.9% of GDP, the widest since official records began in 1948. Many economists, including the IMF and FPC have suggested the UK is therefore vulnerable to foreign investors becoming less willing to invest in the country. In this post we challenge the idea that the UK is at the mercy of the “kindness of strangers”. Looking at gross, rather than net capital flows since 2012 suggests inflows have been extremely subdued relative to past levels. Instead, the UK has benefitted from increasing capital gains on past foreign investments and used these to fund its spending. We argue this carries lower financial stability risks than relying on gross inflows to cover the current account deficit.

Ben Bernanke famously remarked that “the trouble with QE is that it works in practice but not in theory”. And ahead of its adoption, many academics were sceptical that QE would have any effects at all. Yet despite QE being a part of the monetary policy landscape for nearly a decade, the bulk of academic research on QE has been on its empirical effect, with relatively little on theory and less still on normative policy questions. In a recent Staff Working Paper I develop a model which can provide answers to questions such as: “How should monetary policymakers return their instruments to more normal levels?” and “Should QE be part of the regular monetary policy toolkit?”

Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or its policy committees.

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