To the lower bound and back: measuring UK monetary conditions

Natalie Burr, Julian Reynolds and Mike Joyce

Monetary policymakers have a number of tools they can use to influence monetary conditions, in order to maintain price stability. While central banks typically favour short-term policy rates as their primary instrument, when policy rates remained constrained at near-zero levels following the global financial crisis (GFC), many central banks – including the Bank of England – turned to unconventional policies to further ease monetary conditions. How can the combined effect of these policies be measured? This post presents one possible metric – a Monetary Conditions Index – that uses a data-driven approach to summarise information from a range of variables related to the conduct of UK monetary policy. We discuss what this implies about how UK monetary conditions have evolved since the GFC.

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Another reason to care about investment taxes

Alex Kontoghiorghes

Do lower taxes lead to higher stock prices? Do companies consider tax rates when deciding on their dividend pay-outs and whether to issue new capital? If you’re thinking ‘yes’, you might be surprised to know that there was little real-world evidence (let alone UK-based evidence) which finds a strong link between personal investment tax rates on the one hand, and stock prices and the financial decisions of companies on the other. In this post, I summarise the findings from a recent study which shows that capital gains and dividend taxes do indeed have big effects on risk-adjusted equity returns, as well as the dividend, capital structure, and real investment decisions of companies.

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What is the information content of oil futures curves?

Julian Reynolds

Moves in oil prices have significant implications for the global economic outlook, affecting consumer prices, firm costs and country export revenues. But oil futures contracts tend to give an imperfect steer for the future path of oil prices because, at any given time, futures contracts may be affected by a wide range of fundamental drivers, besides the expected path of future spot prices. This post presents an empirical methodology to determine the so-called ‘information content’ of oil futures curves. I decompose the oil future-to-spot price ratio into structural shocks, which reflect different fundamental drivers of futures prices, in order to identify the extent to which futures prices reflect market information about the outlook for spot prices.

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Informed trading in government bond markets

Robert Czech, Shiyang Huang, Dong Lou and Tianyu Wang

Government bond yields serve as a benchmark for virtually all other rates in financial markets. But what factors drive these yields? One view is that yields only move notably when important news hit the market, for example monetary policy announcements. Others suspect that some investors have an information advantage due to their access to costly information (e.g. data providers) or more accurate interpretations of public information. In a recent paper, we show that two investor groups – hedge funds and mutual funds – have an information edge in the UK government bond (gilt) market, and that these two investor types operate through different trading strategies and over different horizons.

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The macro consequences of dollar shortages and central bank swap lines during the Covid-19 pandemic

Fernando Eguren Martin

Dollar shortages in funding markets outside the United States have been a recurrent feature of the last three major crises, including the turmoil associated with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The Federal Reserve has responded by improving conditions and extending the reach of its network of central bank swap lines, with the aim of channelling US dollars to non-US financial systems. Despite the recurrence of this phenomena, little is known about the macroeconomic consequences of both dollar shortage shocks and central bank swap lines. In this post (and in an underlying Staff Working Paper) I provide some tentative answers.

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Fluttering and falling: banks’ capital requirements for credit valuation adjustment (CVA) risk since 2014

Giulio Malberti and Thom Adcock

The financial crisis exposed banks’ vulnerability to a type of risk associated with derivatives: credit valuation adjustment (CVA) risk. Despite being a major driver of losses – around $43 billion across 10 banks according to one estimate – there had been no capital requirement to cushion banks against these losses. New rules in 2014 changed this.

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Does liquidity spill over in the credit market? The case of CDS and corporate bonds

Robert Czech

Credit default swaps (CDS) have a notoriously bad reputation. Critics refer to CDS as a “global joke” that should be “outlawed”, not at least due to the opaque market structure. Even the Vatican labelled CDS trading as “extremely immoral”. But could there be a brighter side to these swaps? In theory, CDS contracts can reduce risks in financial markets by providing valuable insurance. In a recent paper, I show that CDS also offer another, more subtle benefit: an increase in the liquidity of the underlying bonds.

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Bitesize: 250 years of the bond-equity correlation

Matt Roberts-Sklar.

For most of the 18^th-20^th centuries, government bonds usually behaved like a risky asset. When equity prices fell, bond yields rose, i.e. bond and equity returns were positively correlated (bond prices move inversely to yields). But since the mid-2000s, bond and equity returns have been negatively correlated, i.e. bonds became a hedge for risk. Before this, the last time this correlation was near zero for a prolonged period was the long depression in the late 19^th century.

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No smog without fire: the financial stability risks around carbon-intensive investments

Rhiannon Sowerbutts.

An abrupt transition to a lower-carbon economy might cause disruption in financial markets as the value of energy companies is rapidly reassessed. Last year there was a sea change in attitudes as several funds divested their fossil fuel related assets, equity analysts and rating agencies began to issue warnings about carbon-intensive firms and the Paris Climate Change agreement was hailed as a breakthrough as it made the concept of a carbon budget that would limit future fossil fuel use mainstream. However, analysis of climate related ‘events’ suggests that although energy firms’ equity prices move in the expected direction this movement isn’t statistically significant. This doesn’t mean as global citizens we can relax, either about financial stability or for the future of the planet.

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