Category: Monetary Policy

Sluggish deposit rates and the effects of monetary policy

Alberto Polo

Could the slow response of deposit rates to changes in monetary policy strengthen its impact on the economy? At first look, the answer would probably be ‘no’. Imperfect pass-through of policy to deposit rates means that the rates on a portion of assets in the economy respond by less than they could. But what if this meant that the rates on other assets responded by more? In a recent paper, I develop a model that is consistent with a number of features of banks’ assets and liabilities and find that monetary policy has a larger effect on economic activity and inflation if the pass-through of policy to deposit rates is partial.

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Words which travel the world: global spillovers of the Fed information effect

Marco Pinchetti and Andrzej Szczepaniak

It is certainly not a mystery that the Fed’s monetary policy is of great importance for financial markets and the global economy. However, in a recently published Staff Working Paper, we show that the Fed’s monetary policy measures are not the only valuable piece of information contained in the Fed’s announcements. Changes in the Fed’s economic assessment drive investors’ risk behaviour and international capital allocation decisions. Through this channel, changes in Fed views can affect financial conditions and economic activity in the rest of the world, independent of policy actions. 

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The macroprudential toolkit: effectiveness and interactions

Stephen Millard, Margarita Rubio and Alexandra Varadi

The 2008 global financial crisis showed the need for effective macroprudential policy. But what tools should macroprudential policy makers use and how effective are they? We examined these questions in in a recent staff working paper. We introduced different macroprudential tools into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the UK economy and compared their impact on the economy and household welfare, as well as their interaction with each other and with monetary policy. We found that capital requirements reduce the effects of financial shocks. Instead, a limit on how much of borrowers’ income is spent on mortgage interest payments reduces the volatility of lending, output and inflation resulting from housing market shocks.

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Preferred habitat behaviour in the gilt market

Julia Giese, Michael Joyce, Jack Meaning and Jack Worlidge

Every financial market transaction has two parties, each with their own preferences. One channel through which quantitative easing works rests on these differences: preferred habitat investors value certain assets above others for non-pecuniary reasons, beyond risk and return. Central bank asset purchases of the preferred asset create scarcity, which may lead to compensating price adjustment, with spillovers to other assets and the macroeconomy. There is, however, little hard evidence on these investors. In a staff working paper, we use a new granular data set on gilt market holdings and transactions to identify groups of investors with preferred portfolio duration habitats. We present a case study suggesting that the Bank’s purchases appear to have come disproportionately from one group of these investors with a relatively strong preference for specific gilt maturities.

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Impact of the UK QE on banks’ balance sheets

Mahmoud Fatouh

Quantitative easing (QE) involves creating new central bank reserves to fund asset purchases. Deposited in the reserves account of the seller’s bank, these reserves can have implications for banks’ asset mixes. In our paper, we use balance sheet data for 118 UK banks to empirically investigate whether the asset compositions of banks involved in the UK QE operations reacted differently in comparison to banks not involved in the initial rounds of QE between March 2009 and July 2012.

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Household debt and labour supply – a new labour market channel

Philip Bunn, Jagjit Chadha, Thomas Lazarowicz, Stephen Millard and Emma Rockall

Does higher household debt lead to greater labour supply? Ahead of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), UK household debt rose considerably. Since that crisis, the UK labour market has experienced high employment and high participation, alongside relatively weak wage growth. Might these observations be evidence that higher debt leads to higher labour supply? In a recent Working Paper, we attempt to answer this question. We do find a significant channel by which households with higher debt increase their labour supply in response to negative income shocks by more than households with lower (or no) debt. But, we do not think the effect is strong enough to explain the post-crisis strength in employment and participation at the aggregate level.

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Challenges to monetary policy: lessons from Medieval Europe

Nathan Sussman

The Bank of England co-organised a ‘History and Policy Making Conference‘ in late 2020. This guest post by Nathan Sussman, Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, is based on material included in his conference presentation.

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Central banks and history: a troubled relationship

Barry Eichengreen

The Bank of England co-organised a ‘History and Policy Making Conference‘ in late 2020. This guest post by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California Berkley, is based on material included in his keynote address at the conference.

Learning from history is hard. At central banks, it can be hard to draw policymakers’ attention to historical evidence. Even when historical analogies are at the forefront of their minds, the right analogies are not always applied in the right way. In fact, over-reliance on a small number of compelling historical case studies can lead to suboptimal decisions. Policymakers therefore need access to a wide portfolio of analogies. They must also cultivate an historical sensibility that is suspicious of simplification and alert to the differences – as well as the similarities – between ‘now’ and ‘then’.

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