Financial Markets

Julia Giese and Charlotte Grace In response to the global financial crisis, the Bank of England (BoE) began using Product-Mix Auctions (PMA) to provide liquidity insurance to financial institutions. The PMA, designed by Paul Klemperer, allows the quantity of funds lent against different types of collateral to react flexibly to the economic environment and market … Continue reading How auction design can make a difference: the case of the Bank’s Indexed Long-Term Repo Facility →

Francesca Diluiso, Barbara Annicchiarico and Marco Carli While climate change is often seen as a long-term concern, climate mitigation policies can have different short-term effects, since they affect the transmission mechanism of conventional macroeconomic shocks. In a new working paper, we show that cap-and-trade schemes lead to lower volatility in GDP and financial variables, and … Continue reading Beyond emissions: the interplay of macroprudential regulation and climate policy →

Yuliya Baranova, Eleanor Holbrook, David MacDonald, William Rawstorne, Nicholas Vause and Georgia Waddington The functioning of major government bond and related repo markets has deteriorated on several occasions in recent years as trading demand has overwhelmed dealers’ intermediation capacity. Seeking a remedy, Duffie (2020) proposes a study of the costs and benefits of a clearing … Continue reading Central clearing and the functioning of government bond markets →

Saleem Bahaj, Robert Czech, Sitong Ding and Ricardo Reis Few topics captivate our attention like the enigma of inflation. Understanding where the market thinks inflation is headed is crucial for policymakers, investors, and anyone who wants to keep their financial ducks in a row. And that’s where inflation swaps come into play. They are like … Continue reading Decoding the market for inflation risk →

Julian Oakland Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are supposed to be simple and straightforward, and for the most part they are, but one group punches well above its weight when it comes to market impact. In this post, I show that leveraged and inverse (L&I) ETFs generate rebalancing flows that: (1) are always in the same direction … Continue reading Leveraged and inverse ETFs – the exotic side of exchange-traded funds →

Nicholas Vause and Carolin Pflueger Recently, Pflueger, Siriwardane and Sunderam (2020) proposed a new measure of investor risk perceptions based on the cross-section of stock prices. Using that measure, they found that when risk perceptions are high, the cost of capital of risky firms is high and subsequently real investment and employment decline in the … Continue reading Risk perceptions and economic activity in the United Kingdom →

Mahmoud Fatouh and Ioana Neamțu Similar to the Deutsche Bank’s episode in 2016 and the Covid stress in 2020, AT1 spreads over subordinated debt rose rapidly and sharply following the Credit Swiss rescue deal. Beyond these three cases, AT1 spreads have been stable. In this post, we focus on conversion risk of AT1 bonds (also … Continue reading Convertible or not: making sense of stresses in AT1 bonds market →

Lydia Henning, Simon Jurkatis, Manesh Powar and Gian Valentini Autumn 2022 saw some of the largest intraday moves in gilt yields in history. It was then that jargon normally confined to financial stability papers entered into mainstream commentary – ‘LDI’, ‘doom loop’, ‘deleveraging’. And it was then that the Bank of England engaged in an … Continue reading Lifting the lid on a liquidity crisis →

Kristin Forbes, Christian Friedrich and Dennis Reinhardt Recent episodes of financial stress, including the ‘dash for cash’ at the onset of the Covid-19 (Covid) pandemic, pressure in the UK’s liability-driven investment funds in 2022, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, were stark reminders of the vulnerability of financial institutions to shocks that … Continue reading Funding structures and resilience to shocks after a decade of regulatory reform →

Jonathan Acosta-Smith, Benjamin Guin, Mauricio Salgado-Moreno and Quynh-Anh Vo Over the past years, a growing consensus has acknowledged the need to construct a ‘system [wherein] every financial decision takes climate change into account‘. While such a system is still far from reality, market participants already produce and demand an increasing amount of climate-related information. Equally, … Continue reading Understanding climate-related disclosures of UK financial institutions →