….Tyler Curtis from Hall Cross Academy, Doncaster, whose winning post, “How lab-grown burgers could feed the world”, is published today on Bank Underground and in the FT. You can also read the post selected by our judges as the runner-up, “Facebook bank anyone?” by Nicola Medicoff of St Paul’s Girls School, Hammersmith.

We had almost 200 entries from schools all over the UK, spanning an enormous range of topics. We had an enjoyable but tough task in whittling down the entries down to a final shortlist of 5.  The winner was picked  by our expert panel of Chris Giles (Economics Editor, FT), Martin Sandbu (Author of Free Lunch, FT), Silvana Tenreyro (Monetary Policy Committee member) and Sonya Branch (General Counsel at the BoE).  Sonya commented “I was enormously impressed by the number of innovative and thought provoking entries we received from students. The top two entries were particularly inspiring and challenge those of us who deal with these issues as part of our day jobs to think differently.” And Silvana added “It was thrilling to read so many insightful, thoughtful and well-crafted pieces.”

A big thankyou to all those who took part. It was brilliant to read so many blog posts from the policymakers, commentators, business leaders and journalists of the future.  Whatever the future holds for the economy, we will have some very smart economists to help us understand it!

John Lewis

Managing Editor

We now have a dedicated staff-run twitter handle for Bank of England Research, @BoE_Research. From now on, this will be the main place for all our research related tweets, including those about Bank Underground. This gives us space to cover blog posts and Staff Working Papers in more depth, plus conferences, journal publications and other news involving Bank of England research(ers). As with Bank Underground and Staff Working Papers, it’s staff-run rather than representing official views of the Bank.

Please follow @BoE_Research to keep up to date with all our research news.

John Lewis, Managing Editor

John Lewis.

Today we begin a 3-part series of posts telling the story of a period of financial boom and bust in British economic history, when crises hit with almost clockwork regularity:  1847, 1857 and 1866.  We delved deep into the Bank’s archives to reveal letters exchanged between Governors and Chancellors of the Exchequer temporarily suspending the law, read the diary entries of the people at the heart of the turmoil, and perused the Bank’s ledgers of the time to bring the crises to life.  Together these three episodes were crucial in shaping the evolution of the Bank’s role into what we now think of as a central bank; the lessons learned during this time resulted in half a century of financial stability and are as relevant now as they were then.

Continue reading “Christmas special: Financial Crises in the 19th century” →

Since we launched the blog, we’ve valued the fact that readers have responded to posts either by blogging in response, tweeting about them, or emailing us. I’m pleased to say we are now taking this engagement a step further by allowing you, our readers, to post comments on the blog itself.

Continue reading “Commenting on Bank Underground posts” →

Bank Underground is a new blog written by staff at the Bank of England. Our goal is to bring more of our thinking into the public domain and to showcase our analytical and research output. We hope to contribute to the wider debate on areas that are relevant to the Bank’s work.

Continue reading “The Bank of England enters the blogosphere…” →