(Updated) A benchmark global carbon price to support climate risk metrics

This post was updated on 19 September 2025

Mike Knight

Since the original post, published 17 April 2025, I’ve received feedback from carbon industry participants on the possibility of a global-level benchmark price. Put simply, this feedback endorsed key points in the original post – that, for the reasons set out in the post, there does not exist a credible global-level benchmark carbon price. Moreover, to remedy this situation, industry participants raised the concept of co-creation – that the stronger the signal from the public sector on the benefits and use cases of such a benchmark, the greater the likelihood that the private sector could provide and administer it. Go to the end to continue reading.

In this post, I argue that, to strengthen climate risk metrics, the pricing of carbon should be transparent and consistent. I suggest that lessons can be learned from existing commodities and interest rate markets in the role a benchmark price (for carbon) could play to provide that transparency and consistency. Further, I propose that a benchmark incorporating existing explicit and implicit carbon prices could be sufficiently credible to allow widespread adoption. I then propose a high-level methodology for such a benchmark.

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Parental guidance: the influence of parents on young people and their attitudes towards cash

Lily Smith

Like mother, like daughter? Like father, like son? Despite the increasing prevalence of digital payments in today’s world, young people continue to use cash. The persistence of cash use, even among youngsters who have grown up with debit cards and smartphones, raises interesting questions about the factors that influence young people’s payment choices. Are they really rebelling against their parents or are they more like them than they care to admit? It seems that young people are following in their parent’s footsteps and choosing to use cash because their parents do so. And instead of rolling their eyes at their advice, young people are in fact turning to them for hints and tips on money management.

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Forbearance lending as a crisis management tool

Isabelle Roland, Yukiko Saito and Philip Schnattinger

The Bank of England Agenda for Research (BEAR) sets the key areas for new research at the Bank over the coming years. This post is an example of issues considered under the Prudential Architecture Theme which focuses on the evolving regulatory structures and fresh strategic issues for regulators and supervisors.

Interventions in corporate credit markets have featured prominently in the policy response to crisis episodes over the last two decades. Loan forbearance features prominently among those interventions by lenders and/or regulators. It is a practice whereby banks grant temporary relief to struggling borrowers, to avoid default. On balance, the literature is critical of loan forbearance in the corporate sector because of its potential to contribute to zombification – a situation where bank lending keeps unproductive firms alive, resulting in lower aggregate total factor productivity. Results from our new paper show that forbearance lending in combination with business restructuring plans can provide temporary relief for struggling firms, safeguarding output and employment, without contributing to the zombification of the corporate sector. Note that our research is focused on the impact of forbearance on the corporate sector; the impact of forbearance on lenders is a separate question outside the scope of our paper.

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Tracking the price of carbon: price substitution effects across energy markets

Dooho Shin and Rebecca Mari

The Bank of England Agenda for Research (BEAR) sets the key areas for new research at the Bank over the coming years. This post is an example of issues considered under the Financial System Theme which focuses on the shifting landscape and new risks confronting financial policymakers.

Carbon pricing has emerged as one of the main mitigation measures adopted around the world to fight climate change. In the UK and EU, increases in carbon prices in the Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) work as an incentive to substitute away from emissions-intensive activities and sources of power. Such increases can be a result of direct government policies, but as we explain in this post, changes in carbon prices appear to be also endogenously linked to developments in energy markets. An understanding of the possible transmission channels underlying the relationship between the two is important to assess how climate-related risks are linked to broader macroeconomic developments and thus monetary and financial stability.

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What can 40 years of data on vacancy advertising costs tell us about labour market equilibrium?

Michal Stelmach, James Kensett and Philip Schnattinger

Economists frequently use the vacancies to unemployment (V/U) ratio to measure labour market tightness. Analysis of the labour market during the current inflationary period often assumes the V/U ratio is constant and compares this measure with a supposed pre-2019 equilibrium. However, the V/U ratio has trended upwards over recent decades. We explore the impact of changing vacancy posting costs on equilibrium labour market tightness through the lens of two models: an empirical error-correction model; and a simple structural ‘search and matching’ model. We find that the raw V/U ratio can be misleading for conclusions about labour market tightness. We outline an improved measure – the VU gap – which indicates that the UK labour market returned to a broadly balanced position in 2024 H2.

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Global financial centre and its regulators: what’s the strategy when everyone wants to be the top dog?

Carlos Cañón Salazar, John Thanassoulis and Misa Tanaka

Several global financial centres, including London, Hong Kong and Singapore, are overseen by financial regulators with an objective on competitiveness and growth. In a recent staff working paper, we develop a theoretical model to show that some competitive deregulation can arise when several regulators are focused on growth, though not a ‘race-to-the-bottom’: regulators will not lower regulations to levels favoured by banks if the costs of financial instability are large. To maintain competitiveness and stability of the UK as a global financial centre, there is a need for a comprehensive strategy which takes into account both regulatory and non-regulatory measures. This may require coordination across multiple institutions.

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What has macropru ever done for you? Macropru announcements can lead to a substantial reduction in systemic risk

Kristina Bluwstein and Alba Patozi

Measuring financial stability is very difficult. Measuring the effectiveness of policies affecting financial stability even more so. Not only is the objective of financial stability an elusive concept, but policies targeting financial stability are often complex, technical, and very slowly implemented. In spite of this, the usage of macroprudential tools in both advanced economies (AEs) and emerging market economies (EMEs) has more than tripled (Chart 1) over the last 30 years. Communications about these tools have also sharply increased from almost non-existent pre-GFC to hundreds of speeches per year (Chart 2). In a recent working paper, we try to estimate the effect of these macroprudential policy announcements on financial stability in the UK by constructing a novel series of unexpected announcements and measuring their effect on systemic risk in the financial sector.

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GIV us some credit: estimating the macroeconomic effects of credit supply shocks

Sam Christie and Aniruddha Rajan

Sudden contractions in credit supply can trigger and amplify recessions – a reality made painfully clear by the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). However, quantifying these real economic effects is challenging. In this post, we demonstrate a novel way to do so using Granular Instrumental Variables (GIV), focusing on the UK mortgage market. The core idea is that we can exploit the market’s concentration to build up exogenous fluctuations in aggregate credit supply from idiosyncratic lender-specific shocks. Using our GIV, we find evidence that contractionary mortgage supply shocks can have quantitatively significant effects on the macroeconomy, causing persistent decreases in output, consumption, and investment, alongside increases in unemployment.

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Why do government bond yields drift when news is on its way?

Danny Walker, Dong Lou, Gabor Pinter and Semih Üslü

Government bond yields tend to drift higher in the days before monetary policy or data news in the UK. Over the past two decades this tendency – which we label ‘pre-news drift’ – has pushed up on yields by 2 percentage points in total over that period. The drift concentrates in pre-news periods that coincide with the issuance of UK government bonds, which is more common than it used to be. Our analysis shows that dealers and hedge funds are reluctant to buy bonds when news is on its way, which pushes up yields. Pre-news drift could affect the signal monetary policy makers draw from market rates and it could have implications for the optimal timing of bond issuance. There are further details in an associated working paper.

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Fossicking in the dark or twenty-twenty foresight?

Rishi Khiroya and Lydia Henning

If you asked people what skill they would most love to have, you might receive answers like ‘to fly’, ‘to be invisible’ or even ‘predicting the future’. If you asked people who worked in financial markets in particular, ‘accurately predicting the future’ would probably be top of the list. From economic trends to political shifts, market participants have a stake in anticipating what comes next. We use data collected from the Bank’s Market Participants Survey (MaPS) to see how market predictions have tended to compare with what subsequently unfolds over the period of high uncertainty and volatility that has been observed in the wake of the pandemic – and how predictive accuracy has varied depending on the time horizon in question.

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