Impact of the UK QE on banks’ balance sheets

Mahmoud Fatouh

Quantitative easing (QE) involves creating new central bank reserves to fund asset purchases. Deposited in the reserves account of the seller’s bank, these reserves can have implications for banks’ asset mixes. In our paper, we use balance sheet data for 118 UK banks to empirically investigate whether the asset compositions of banks involved in the UK QE operations reacted differently in comparison to banks not involved in the initial rounds of QE between March 2009 and July 2012.

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Challenges to monetary policy: lessons from Medieval Europe

Nathan Sussman

The Bank of England co-organised a ‘History and Policy Making Conference‘ in late 2020. This guest post by Nathan Sussman, Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, is based on material included in his conference presentation.

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Monetary policy, sectoral comovement and the credit channel

Federico Di Pace and Christoph Görtz

There is ample evidence that a monetary policy tightening triggers a decline in consumer price inflation and a simultaneous contraction in investment and consumption (eg Erceg and Levin (2006) and Monacelli (2009)). However, in a standard two-sector New Keynesian model, consumption falls while investment increases in response to a monetary policy tightening. In a new paper, we propose a solution to this problem, known as the ‘comovement puzzle’. Guided by new empirical evidence on the relevance of frictions in credit provision, we show that adding these frictions to the standard model resolves the comovement puzzle. This has important policy implications because the degree of comovement between consumption and investment matters for the effectiveness of monetary policy.

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Uncertainty and voting in monetary policy committees

Alastair Firrell and Kate Reinold

The right stance for monetary policy is highly uncertain, and so it is no surprise that members of monetary policy committees – like the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) – regularly disagree about the best course of action. Asking a committee to decide allows different opinions to be aired and challenged, with a majority vote needed to determine policy. But how should we expect those disagreements and votes to change in periods of higher uncertainty? Should we expect more 9–0 unanimous votes? Or more 5–4 close contests? We address these questions in this post and find that the degree of disagreement is little changed in periods of high uncertainty, and nor are dissenting votes. There is, however, some difference in how voting decisions are formed when uncertain, with both individual and committee-wide views having less explanatory power for votes.

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Le Pont de Londres: monetary policy spillovers, prudential policies and the financial centre effect

Robert Hills, Simon Lloyd, Rhiannon Sowerbutts, Dennis Reinhardt, Matthieu Bussière, Baptiste Meunier and Justine Pedrono

Large amounts of capital flow across borders. But these can be destabilising. So can recipient countries employ prudential policies to offset monetary policy changes in centre countries? And does it matter where sending banks are located? Our findings suggest it does. Our case study of French banks operating in London – part of a broader international initiative – suggests prudential policies have a much bigger offsetting effect on French banks’ lending out of the UK’s financial centre than on their lending out of headquarters in France. In line with those observations, we uncover evidence of a ‘London Bridge’ in cross-border lending: the way French banks channel funds to the UK is responsive to prudential policies in the rest of the world.

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Covid-19 briefing: monetary policy strategy post-Covid

Richard Harrison, Kate Reinold and Rana Sajedi

The Covid shock has created substantial and unprecedented challenges for monetary policymakers. This post summarises the key literature on the immediate monetary policy response to the shock, including both tools and short to medium-term strategy issues (but leaving aside the longer-term question of fiscal-monetary interactions).

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Monetary policy and happiness

Philip Bunn and Alice Pugh

It has been well established that macroeconomic outcomes, such as recessions and unemployment, can have important impacts on households’ well-being. So it follows that monetary policy decisions can affect happiness too. In a recent working paper we use a novel approach to assess how the unprecedented loosening in monetary policy in response to the 2008 global financial crisis affected the well-being of UK households. The framework we use could be used to assess the welfare implications of other monetary policy responses, including to the spread of Covid-19 during 2020.

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Choosing from a varied toolkit: assessing China’s overall policy stance

Julian Reynolds, James Owen and Bob Gilhooly

This post examines how policy in China supported the Chinese economy prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on a newly developed toolkit. This topic is particularly important for China, where economic developments have a significant impact on the rest of the global economy, but where assessing the full spectrum of policy – monetary, regulatory and fiscal – is difficult. Policy levers in China have evolved alongside a rapidly changing economy, and there is still some uncertainty surrounding which levers are being pulled – and how hard – at any given point in time. This post attempts to paint a clearer picture of Chinese policy by assessing key policy levers and their effects on growth.

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Monetary policy and US housing expansions: what can we expect for the post-COVID-19 housing recovery?

Bruno Albuquerque, Martin Iseringhausen and Frédéric Opitz

The fall in aggregate demand due to the COVID-19 shock has brought the eight-year long US housing market expansion to a halt. At the same time, the Federal Reserve and the US Government have deployed significant resources to support households and businesses. These actions should help weather the ongoing crisis and lay the seeds for the next recovery. It is, however, highly uncertain how the post-COVID-19 housing recovery will look. Using a time-varying parameter (TVP) model on US aggregate data, our results suggest that the next housing recovery may exhibit similar features to the 2012-19 expansion: a sluggish response of housebuilding to rising demand, but a strong response of house prices.

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Monetary Policy Transmission: Borrowing Constraints Matter!

Fergus Cumming and Paul Hubert

How does the transmission of monetary policy depend on the distribution of debt in the economy? In this blog post we argue that interest rate changes are most powerful when a large share of households are financially constrained. That is, when a higher proportion of all borrowers are close to their borrowing limits. Our findings also suggest that the overall impact of monetary policy partly depends on the behaviour of house prices, and might not be symmetric for interest rate rises and falls.

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