Author: BankUnderground

GIV us some credit: estimating the macroeconomic effects of credit supply shocks

Sam Christie and Aniruddha Rajan

Sudden contractions in credit supply can trigger and amplify recessions – a reality made painfully clear by the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). However, quantifying these real economic effects is challenging. In this post, we demonstrate a novel way to do so using Granular Instrumental Variables (GIV), focusing on the UK mortgage market. The core idea is that we can exploit the market’s concentration to build up exogenous fluctuations in aggregate credit supply from idiosyncratic lender-specific shocks. Using our GIV, we find evidence that contractionary mortgage supply shocks can have quantitatively significant effects on the macroeconomy, causing persistent decreases in output, consumption, and investment, alongside increases in unemployment.

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Why do government bond yields drift when news is on its way?

Danny Walker, Dong Lou, Gabor Pinter and Semih Üslü

Government bond yields tend to drift higher in the days before monetary policy or data news in the UK. Over the past two decades this tendency – which we label ‘pre-news drift’ – has pushed up on yields by 2 percentage points in total over that period. The drift concentrates in pre-news periods that coincide with the issuance of UK government bonds, which is more common than it used to be. Our analysis shows that dealers and hedge funds are reluctant to buy bonds when news is on its way, which pushes up yields. Pre-news drift could affect the signal monetary policy makers draw from market rates and it could have implications for the optimal timing of bond issuance. There are further details in an associated working paper.

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Fossicking in the dark or twenty-twenty foresight?

Rishi Khiroya and Lydia Henning

If you asked people what skill they would most love to have, you might receive answers like ‘to fly’, ‘to be invisible’ or even ‘predicting the future’. If you asked people who worked in financial markets in particular, ‘accurately predicting the future’ would probably be top of the list. From economic trends to political shifts, market participants have a stake in anticipating what comes next. We use data collected from the Bank’s Market Participants Survey (MaPS) to see how market predictions have tended to compare with what subsequently unfolds over the period of high uncertainty and volatility that has been observed in the wake of the pandemic – and how predictive accuracy has varied depending on the time horizon in question.

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Central banks, big and small

Benjamin Kingsmore

Central banks do a lot of things: they implement monetary policy, regulate financial institutions, manage payment systems and analyse economic developments. Many of their tasks are crucial to the functioning of a modern economy. And to make all this happen in practice, armies of unseen officials do the necessary implementing, regulating, managing and analysing. In this post I try to answer some questions about these officials: how many are there? Where are they? And if you wanted to host a party for central bankers, what would be the most convenient location?

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The Bank of England’s statutory monetary policy objectives: a historical and legal account

Michael Salib and Mesha Ghazaleh

The Bank’s monetary policy objectives are some of the most significant objectives bestowed by Parliament on any UK public authority. They are to maintain price stability and, subject to that, support the Government’s economic policy, including its objectives for growth and employment. In our paper we offer a historical and legal account of the Bank’s monetary policy objectives by looking at their origins, the parliamentary debates around their wording and their interpretation in practice. Since being introduced in 1998, our paper finds that they have proved remarkably resilient in directing the Bank’s monetary response over the past 25 years, partly due to the in-built flexibility in their wording. 

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Shaping inflation expectations: the effects of monetary policy

Natalie Burr

In economic theory, expectations of future inflation are an important determinant of inflation, making them a key variable of interest for monetary policy makers. But is there empirical evidence to suggest monetary policy can help determine inflation expectations? I answer this question in a recent paper by applying a Bayesian proxy vector autoregression (BVAR) model to summary measures of inflation expectations for households, firms, professional forecasters and financial markets, derived using principal component analysis (PCA). I find that median inflation expectations respond to contractionary monetary policy, with heterogeneity across groups: financial markets and firms’ expectations fall, while households’ expectations rise. I also document that monetary policy shocks reduce the dispersion of expectations in the 12–18 months following a shock.

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Launch of the 2025–28 Bank of England Agenda for Research

Misa Tanaka

Today the Bank published the 2025–28 ‘Bank of England Agenda for Research’ setting out the key areas for new research over the coming years and a set of priority topics for 2025.

Misa Tanaka works in the Bank’s Research Hub and is the Bank’s Head of Research.

If you want to get in touch, please email us at bankunderground@bankofengland.co.uk or leave a comment below.

Comments will only appear once approved by a moderator, and are only published where a full name is supplied. 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.

Stable gilts and stable prices: assessing the Bank of England’s response to the LDI crisis

Nicolò Bandera and Jacob Stevens

How should the central bank conduct asset purchases to restore market functioning without causing higher inflation? The Bank of England was faced with this question during the 2022 gilt crisis, when it undertook gilt purchases on financial stability grounds while inflation was above 10%. These financial stability asset purchases could have counteracted the monetary policy stance by easing financial conditions at a time when monetary policy was tightening them. Did a trade-off between price and financial stability arise? In our Staff Working Paper, we find the asset purchases stabilised gilt markets without materially affecting the monetary policy stance. This was only possible because the intervention was temporary; highly persistent asset purchases would have created tension between price and financial stability.

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