John Lewis
How poor has the past decade of productivity growth been by historical standards? Exceptionally.
Category Archives: Economic History
Bitesize: The past decade’s productivity growth in historical context
Filed under Bitesize, Economic History, Macroeconomics
Bitesize: UK real interest rates over the past three centuries
John Lewis
How low are UK real interest rates by historical standards? Using the Bank’s Millennium of Macroeconomic Data, I compute real bank rate, mortgage rates, and 10-year government bond yields over time.
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Filed under Bitesize, Economic History, Financial Markets, Macroeconomics
Monetary policy spillovers in the first age of financial globalisation: ripple or a riptide?
Georgina Green
In the first age of financial globalisation, from around 1880 to 1913, many countries tied their currencies to the mast of gold. The Bank of England’s unparalleled influence over this period is depicted by the Lady of the Bank, seated on the globe with a shower of gold coins to one side, which is carved into the Bank’s pediment. There was an old saying in the City that the Bank’s rate could draw gold from the moon. But could it?
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Filed under Economic History, Monetary Policy
Looking inside the ledgers: the Bank of England as a Lender of Last Resort
Michael Anson, David Bholat, Miao Kang and Ryland Thomas
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.
Filed under Banking, Economic History, Financial Markets
Global real interest rates since 1311: Renaissance roots and rapid reversals
Paul Schmelzing
Paul Schmelzing is a visiting scholar at the Bank from Harvard University, where he concentrates on 20th century financial history. In this guest post, he looks at how global real interest rates have evolved over the past 700 years.
With core inflation rates remaining low in many advanced economies, proponents of the “secular stagnation” narrative –that markets are trapped in a period of permanently lower equilibrium real rates- have recently doubled down on their pessimistic outlook. Building on an earlier post on nominal rates this post takes a much longer-term view on real rates using a dataset going back over the past 7 centuries, and finds evidence that the trend decline in real rates since the 1980s fits into a pattern of a much deeper trend stretching back 5 centuries. Looking at cyclical dynamics, however, the evidence from eight previous “real rate depressions” is that turnarounds from such environments, when they occur, have typically been both quick and sizeable.
Filed under Economic History, Financial Markets, Guest Post, Macroeconomics
10 Years after Northern Rock – is the UK more or less likely to see another bank run?
Stephen Clarke
(Northern Rock image – Lee Jordan – Flickr, reproduced from wikimedia commons under CCA licence)
Ten years ago this month, queues of people started to form early in the morning outside Northern Rock branches across the UK, to withdraw their money out of fear that their bank would soon collapse. As the day wore on panic spread, and the run continued until when the government stepped in to guarantee all Northern Rock deposits. It was the UK’s first retail bank run since the 19th century and one of the first symptoms of the global financial crisis. This anniversary is an appropriate time to reflect on those events, but also to look forward and assess how things have moved on in the last decade, and whether something similar could ever happen again.
Bitesize: Elections, confidence and misery (US edition)
Thomas Viegas and Emil Iordanov
Since Donald Trump was elected to the Oval Office last November, consumer confidence in the US has picked up notably. But is this post-election rise unusual?
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Filed under Economic History, International Economics, Macroeconomics
Your country needs funds: The extraordinary story of Britain’s early efforts to finance the First World War
Michael Anson, Norma Cohen, Alastair Owens and Daniel Todman
Financing World War I required the UK government to borrow the equivalent of a full year’s GDP. But its first effort to raise capital in the bond market was a spectacular failure. The 1914 War Loan raised less than a third of its £350m target and attracted only a very narrow set of investors. This failure and its subsequent cover-up has only recently come to light following research analysing the Bank’s ledgers. It reveals the shortfall was secretly plugged by the Bank, with funds registered individually under the names of the Chief Cashier and his deputy to hide their true origin. Keynes, one of a handful of officials in the know at the time, described the concealment as “a masterly manipulation”.
Filed under Debt Management, Economic History, Evolution of Central Banks
Central Bank Balance Sheets: Past, Present and Future
James Barker, David Bholat and Ryland Thomas.
Central bank balance sheets swelled in size in response to the financial crisis of 2007-09. In this blog we discuss what makes them different from the balance sheets of other institutions, how they’ve been used in the past, and how they might evolve in the future as means to implement novel policies – including the revolutionary possibility that a central bank could issue its own digital currency.
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Filed under Banking, Economic History, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy
Eliminating high denomination notes and making the mob miserable
Ronnie Driver
Economists usually talk about money serving three functions – a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. But the ability to make payments using commercial bank deposits, which account for the vast majority of money, has already divorced the physicality of notes from the concept of the medium of exchange. Inflation and non-remuneration renders physical money a poor store of value. And the unit of account does not rely on physical cash. So is there a specific role for physical paper money anymore?
Filed under Currency, Economic History
