In its money market operations, the Bank of England implements the interest rate decisions of its Monetary Policy Committee while meeting the liquidity needs of the banking system and, thus, contributing to its stability. The Bank has decided that it needs to upgrade the way in which it carries...

The transparency and openness of the monetary policymaking process at the Bank of England has provided very detailed information on both the decisions of individual members of the Monetary Policy Committee and the information on which they are based. In this paper we consider this decision...

In this speech, Mervyn King, Deputy Governor, reflects on the first five years of the Monetary Policy Committee. He poses four questions about the role and record of the MPC. First, why give the power to decide interest rates to a committee rather than an individual? Second, does it matter that...

One way of evaluating how well monetary authorities perform is to provide the public with a regular and independent second opinion. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professional and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation...

The literature on the behavior of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has focused on static voting patterns. We find statistical support for a dynamic pattern using a panel reaction function to analyze MPC votes over the 1997-2008 period. We find that internal and external...

Henry Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) established once and for all the notion that central banks have the prime responsibility for controlling the money stock and the price level. This theme and the analytical framework underlying it reappeared in the famous Bullion Report...

The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) are shadowed by professionals and academic economists who provide a separate policy rate recommendation in advance of the central bank's announcement. We explore differences between shadow and actual committee decisions based on an...

The Bank of England introduced the Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) in April 2008 to improve the liquidity position of the UK banking system. It did so by helping banks finance assets that had got stuck on their balance sheets following the closure of some asset-backed securities markets from 2007...

This paper provides new evidence on the rise of the dollar as an international currency, focusing on its role in the conduct of trade and the provision of trade credit. We show that the shift to the dollar occurred much earlier than conventionally supposed: during and immediately after World War...

This article reviews the impact of commercial real estate (CRE hereafter) on macro-financial stability and gives some ideas, how central banks could deal with the risk. First, we present the main features of the CRE market, explain its cycle and outline risks related to this market. Its relation...