Author Archives: Tony Yates

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 →