Three facts about the rising number of UK business exits

Jelle Barkema, Maren Froemel and Sophie Piton

Record-high firm exits make headlines, but who are the firms going out of business? This post documents three facts about the rising number of corporations dissolving using granular data from Companies House and the Insolvency Service. We show that the increase in dissolutions that have already materialised reflected a catch-up following Covid and was concentrated among firms started during Covid. While these firms were small and had a limited macroeconomic impact, firms currently in the process of dissolving are larger. Their exit might therefore be more material from a macroeconomic perspective. We also discuss how the recent economic environment could contribute to further rises in dissolutions and particularly insolvencies in the future that could have more material macroeconomic impact.

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Why lower house prices could lead to higher mortgage rates

Fergus Cumming and Danny Walker

Bank Rate has risen by more than 5 percentage points in the UK over the past couple of years. This has led to much higher mortgage rates for many people. In this post we analyse another potential source of pressure on mortgagors: the potential for falls in house prices to push borrowers into higher – and therefore more expensive – loan to value (LTV) bands. In a scenario where house prices fall by 10% and high LTV spreads rise by 100 basis points, we estimate that an additional 350,000 mortgagors could be pushed above an LTV of 75%, which could increase their annual repayments by an extra £2,000 on average. This could have a material impact on the economy.

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Covid-19 briefing: epi-macro 101

Cristiano Cantore, Federico Di Pace, Riccardo M Masolo, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino and Arthur Turrell

The Covid-19 crisis has led to a swift shift in the emphasis of macroeconomic research. At the centre of this is a new field of inquiry called ‘epi-macro’ that combines epidemiological models with macroeconomic models. In this post, we give a brief introduction to some of the earliest papers in this fast-growing literature.

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Covid-19 briefing: post-lockdown macro

Michael Kumhof

In the wake of Covid-19 lockdown, macroeconomic policymakers have to deal not only with the immediate contraction in the economy, but also with the medium and longer term macro-consequences. Over the past four months, the macroeconomic literature on these topics has expanded rapidly. This post reviews the literature that considers the channels via which the shock affects the economy, and the macroeconomic policy options for dealing with the aftermath, taking as given the shock caused by the virus and the lockdown.

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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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Low-Carbon Macro

Carsten Jung, Theresa Löber, Anina Thiel and Thomas Viegas

Governments have pledged to meet the Paris Target of restricting global temperature rises to ‘well below’ 2˚C. But reducing CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases means reallocating resources away from high-carbon towards low-carbon activities. That reallocation could be considerable: fossil fuels account for more than 10% of world trade and around 10% of global investment. In this post, we consider the macroeconomic effects of the transition to a low-carbon economy and how it might vary across countries. While much of the discussion has focussed on the hit to economic activity and the potential for job losses in higher-carbon sectors, we highlight that the transition also offers opportunities. And the overall impact depends crucially on when and how the transition takes place.

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Back to the future: why we’re optimists in the secular stagnation debate

Saara Tuuli & Sandra Batten

Seven years after the financial crisis, global growth remains anaemic and the policy setting is nowhere near normal. Some commentators have suggested that this reflects some kind of ‘secular stagnation’ which set in before the crisis. This would have profound consequences for future growth and development in both wealthy and poorer countries. We are more optimistic, and see a raft of emerging technologies that could transform growth in many sectors. In this post, we summarise the current debate and offer our views on it.

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