Chance favours the prepared mind: What linked micro data can tell us about the housing market

Perttu Korhonen

Good analysis requires new discoveries, creativity, even luck. But innovation is not just a matter of chance — it favours those who are ready for it, which in this case means having the right data. Utilising micro-data to answer new and different questions is a good start, but the next step is to link such item-level information from various sources together. That way we can create analytical opportunities beyond the sum of the parts. In this post I show how a unique linked dataset on the UK housing market reveals that buy-to-let buyers secure a greater discount from the asking price than other buyers.

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Did Quantitative Easing boost bank lending?

Nick Butt, Rohan Churm & Michael McMahon

When faced by a slowing economy and contracting credit what policy should be used? There is a body of evidence to suggest that QE is an effective means to boosting asset prices, aggregate demand and inflation, but it’s far less clear whether it improves the flow of credit to the economy. In theory, increases in deposit funding caused by such purchases might lead banks to increase lending. In this post we explore how this might occur. But we find no evidence that this happened in the UK. This may reflect the fact that QE worked instead through a so called ‘portfolio rebalancing channel’ and that the resulting churn in banks’ deposit funding stopped any such channel from operating. Continue reading “Did Quantitative Easing boost bank lending?” →

Who benefits from the implicit subsidy to ‘too big to fail’ banks?

Rhiannon Sowerbutts and Peter Zimmerman

Governments have often supported troubled banks whose failure would damage the wider economy. The expectation of such bailouts amounts to free insurance for those who have lent money to these ‘too big to fail’ (TBTF) banks. This amounts to an ‘implicit subsidy’ from the government, with a value that may be as large as £100bn. But where does this money go? We think most of the benefit goes to those who own or work for banks. But verifying this empirically is a challenge requiring further research.
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Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds – and why this matters

Zoltan Jakab & Michael Kumhof

Problems in the banking sector played a critical role in triggering and prolonging the Great Recession. Unfortunately, standard macroeconomic models were initially not ready to provide much support in thinking about the role of banks. This has now changed, with many new papers that study the interaction of banks with the macroeconomy. However, as emphasized by Adrian, Colla and Shin (2013), there are many unresolved issues. In our new paper “Banks Are Not Intermediaries of Loanable Funds – And Why This Matters” (Jakab and Kumhof (2015)), we argue that many of them can be traced to the fact that virtually all of the newly developed models are based on the intermediation of loanable funds (ILF) theory of banking. Continue reading “Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds – and why this matters” →

BoE archives reveal little known lesson from the 1974 failure of Herstatt Bank

Ben Norman

In June of 1974, a small German bank, Herstatt Bank, failed. While the bank itself was not large, its failure became synonymous with fx settlement risk, and its lessons served as the impetus for work over the subsequent three decades to implement real-time settlement systems now used the world over. Documents from the Bank of England’s Archive shed light on a lesser known aspect of Herstatt’s failure – the chain reaction it caused across financial centres as banks in different countries delayed settling their payments to each other. The lesson for policymakers today to grapple with is: when a bank fails, could we still expect surviving banks to delay making payments, with a potential chain reaction in the payment system?

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