John Lewis and Belinda Tracey

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Bank Underground! On 19 June 2015 we launched with our maiden pair of posts on how driverless cars might shake up the insurance industry and optimal monetary policy in the presence of an effective lower bound.

Continue reading “Bank Underground turns 5!” →

Given our need to reprioritise staff resources towards responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ll be temporarily pausing publishing posts on Bank Underground. We will review this periodically and hope to resume soon.

Belinda Tracey, Managing Editor

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.

As another year draws to an end, we wanted to take a look back at the blog in 2019. In case you missed any of them the first time round, the five most viewed posts for the year were:

1. Handel and the Bank of England
2. Houses are assets not goods: part 1 and part 2
3. The ownership of central banks
4. Opening the machine learning black box
5. What happens when ‘angels fall’?

We hope you enjoyed the blog in 2019. Happy New Year and we look forward to you reading our posts in 2020!

Belinda Tracey, Managing Editor

As the year draws to a close and the blog prepares for a couple of weeks’ downtime over the festive period, we recap on the five most viewed posts for the year.  They span a wide range of topics including the reason for weak productivity growth, the macroeconomic effects of demographic change, what steeper yield curves mean for bank profitability, the future prospects for digital currencies, and drivers of consumer credit growth.

If you missed any of them first time round, this is a good chance to catch up on the posts that your fellow readers liked (or at least read) the most:

1. The seven deadly paradoxes of cryptocurrency
2. Population ageing and the macroeconomy
3. Is a steeper yield curve good news for banks? A challenge to conventional wisdom
4. The UK’s productivity puzzle is in the top tail of distribution
5. Who’s driving consumer credit growth

We hope you enjoyed the blog in 2018. Happy Christmas and we look forward to you reading our posts in 2019!

John Lewis, Managing Editor

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 will forever be remembered as a pivotal moment in the global financial crisis. TV pictures flashed around the world of staff carrying their belongings out of their offices as their employer filed for bankruptcy. But few observers watching at the time foresaw the tumultuous events that would be unleashed in the weeks and months that followed.  And the consequences endured: for policymakers, academics and market participants alike, the world was never quite the same again.

In this special series of posts, we turn the clock back to 2008 to look at how the crisis unfolded and what those events revealed about the economic and financial system.  This week, we’ll publish four posts, each focussing on a different aspect. Today’s opening post explores how trouble in the subprime US mortgage market ended up creating a global emergency.  Subsequent posts will look at the sharp contraction in cross-border lending, the turmoil in money markets, and knock-on effects on the global economy.

The authors take a diverse range of approaches- some draw on earlier academic work, some focus on the evolution of the data, others try to piece together the mechanics of the system. As ever, we welcome your discussion of our work- either using the comments facility at the foot of each post, tagging @BoE_Research on twitter or best of all – via by writing a response on your own blog!

John Lewis, Managing Editor