“Systemic risk” now occupies centre stage in discussions of bank regulatory reform. Systemic risk is often seen as a problem of size, operational complexity, interconnectivity and contagion. It is less often discussed in terms of the institutional framework of legal rules and principles...

Central bank balance sheets swelled in size in response to the financial crisis of 2007-09. In this article we discuss what makes them different from the balance sheets of other institutions, how they've been used in the past, and how they might evolve in the future as means to implement novel...

This article recaps a conference on monetary and financial law held at the Bank of England. It reflects on international regulatory reform, the institutional structure of international monetary and financial law, resolution, and alternative currencies, payment systems and finance providers

In this joint Bank of England and Behavioural Insights Team study, we test the effectiveness of different approaches to central bank communications. Using an online experiment with a representative sample of the UK population, we measure how changes to the Bank of England's summaries of the...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...

Our paper analyses confidential letters sent from the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to banks and building societies it supervises. These letters are a ‘report card' written to firms annually, and are arguably the most important, regularly recurring written...

It is well known that quantitative credit restrictions, rather than Bagehot-style ‘free lending' constituted the standard response to financial crises in the early days of central banking. But why did central banks in the past frequently restrict the supply of loans during financial crises? In...

Financial inclusion means every adult having access to fair and affordable savings, transactional banking, credit and insurance. It also requires consumers of financial services to be literate around their use. Whilst this sounds unobjectionably positive, expanding access to financial products...

This article discusses a small scale pilot to harmonise three Bank of England statistical and regulatory data forms. The primary purpose of the pilot was to assess opportunities for improved operational efficiency in regulatory reporting. The broader purpose was to demonstrate how common data...