Monthly Archives: June 2017

Two posts ago, I mentioned that the basic plan central banks had for withdrawing stimulus was to go first with rates, and then scale back QE. That plan was based on wanting to avoid the risk that, if another recession … Continue reading →

The Bank of England published its Financial Stability Report, and, along with it the decision of its Financial Policy Committee to raise the counter-cyclical capital buffer from 0 to 0.5%.  Interestingly, there is also an announced plan to raise this … Continue reading →

The original plan for balance sheet shrinkage, articulated by Bernanke in the States, and Mervyn King in the UK, was organised around the idea of spending as small an amount of time as possible using QE as the marginal tool … Continue reading →

It was very surprising to hear Janet Yellen hint in public that there was a good case for raising the inflation target. The economic logic of doing just that is very sound:  if we think that equilibrium real interest rates … Continue reading →

The UK is rightly transfixed with the unfolding story of the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower in Kensington, London, which at the time of writing had led to 30 confirmed deaths.  This follows – as the Queen pointed out in … Continue reading →

‘Requisition houses?  Communism!’ That is the impulse of some to respond to Jeremy Corbyn’s offhand suggestion that empty properties of ‘the rich’ be requisitioned for use rehousing those made homeless by disasters like the fire at Grenfell Tower. But there … Continue reading →

This pulls together tweets that I sent on the history of inflation targeting, having read this article in the New York Times.  Warning:  this is a highly subjective, UK-centric and stream-of-consciousness, and still very brief ‘history’. A key thing to … Continue reading →

Something I did not stress about the likelihood of a crypto-currency takeover in my Alphaville post that I should have done, and which cropped up in a Twitter exchange with Joe Weisenthal, relates to the fact that in theory, and … Continue reading →

In keeping with the modern custom of bombarding readers with a product using every conceivable media possible, multiple times, here is a link to my post on this.  

Well, not really:  that was click-bait.   But bear with me. The unprecedented increase in the size of central bank balance sheets since before the great financial crisis is unlikely to be entirely reversed.  And that means a one-off bit … Continue reading →