Month: March 2019

Can ‘stablecoins’ be stable?

Ben Dyson

Cryptoassets (or ‘cryptocurrencies’) are notoriously volatile. For example, in November 2018, Bitcoin – one of the more stable cryptoassets – lost 43% of its value in just 11 days. This kind of volatility makes it difficult for cryptoassets to function as money: they’re too unstable to be a good store of value, means of exchange or unit of account. But could so-called ‘stablecoins’ solve this problem and finally provide a price-stable cryptoasset?

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The Missing Link: Monetary Policy and The Labor Share

Cristiano Cantore, Filippo Ferroni and Miguel León-Ledesma.

How do monetary policy shocks affect the distribution of income between workers and owners of capital? Do workers benefit relatively more when policy changes? Tackling this question empirically requires technical econometric methods, but we are able to show that the share of output allocated to wages (the labor share) temporarily increases following a positive shock to the interest rate. This means that the slice of the pie enjoyed by those whose earnings are mostly made up of wages increases at the expense of profits and capital income. Strikingly, this redistribution channel that shows up in the data runs precisely in the opposite direction to the predictions of standard New Keynesian models commonly used to study the effects of monetary policy.

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Diffraction through debt: the cash-flow effect of monetary policy

Fergus Cumming.

As the UK economy went into recession in 2008, the Monetary Policy Committee responded with a 400 basis point reduction in Bank Rate between October 2008 and March 2009. Although this easing lessened the impact of the recession across the whole economy, its cash-flow effect would have initially benefited some households more than others. Those holding large debt contracts with repayments closely linked to policy rates immediately received substantial boosts to their disposable income. Cheaper mortgage repayments meant more pounds in peoples’ pockets, and this supported both spending and employment in 2009. In this article I explore one element of the monetary transmission mechanism that works through cash-flow effects associated with the mortgage market, and show that it can vary across both time and space.

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The whys and wherefores of short-time work: evidence from 20 countries

Reamonn Lydon, Thomas Mathae and Stephen Millard

Short-time work (STW) schemes are an important fiscal stabiliser in many countries.  In the Great Recession, 25 out of 33 OECD countries used short-time work schemes (Balleer et al. 2016).  STW schemes aim to preserve employment in firms temporarily experiencing weak demand. This is achieved by providing subsidies to firms to reduce number of hours worked by each employee, instead of reducing the number of workers. As well as being paid for actual hours worked, the subsidy is used to pay workers for hours not worked – albeit not completely compensating the loss of income due to reduced hours. In most countries, the bulk of the subsidy is paid by the state, although companies can also contribute.

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Bitesize: Trading activity during the Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme

David Mallaburn, Matt Roberts-Sklar and Laura Silvestri.

The Bank of England’s August 2016 monetary policy package included the £10bn ‘Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme’ (CBPS). But who did the BoE buy those bonds from?

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