Dario Bonciani and Johannes Fischer The UK economy has been hit by significant terms-of-trade shocks, most notably the rise in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These shocks have created substantial and persistent inflationary pressure in many countries. Such upheavals bring increased uncertainty about the future, making macroeconomic forecasting more challenging. In this … Continue reading Forecasting UK inflation in the presence of large global shocks
Monetary Policy
Josh Martin The Monetary Policy Committee has recently looked at wage growth as an important indicator of inflation persistence. One way that wages matter for price inflation is as a cost for businesses, who may raise their prices in response to higher wages. For this channel, the wage measure needs to reflect the coverage and … Continue reading CPI-weighted wage growth
Lennart Brandt, Natalie Burr and Krisztian Gado The Bank of England has a 2% annual inflation rate target in the ONS’ consumer prices index. But looking at its 700 item categories, we find that very few prices ever change by 2%. In fact, on a month-on-month basis, only about one fifth of prices change at … Continue reading Beyond the average: patterns in UK price data at the micro level
Rebecca Freeman As another year draws to an end and the blog prepares for some downtime over the festive period, we wanted to take a look back at the blog in 2023. In case you missed any of our posts the first time round, the five most viewed posts for the year were: We hope … Continue reading Top 5 posts 2023
Daniel Albuquerque and Jamie Lenney Rent prices have risen by 9% on average in England since the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) started raising interest rates in December 2021. Alongside this rise in prices has been a widening in the gap between reported supply and demand in the rental sector, with tenant demand … Continue reading Is UK monetary policy driving private housing rents?
Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, Richard Harrison and Rana Sajedi Recent increases in interest rates around the world, following a multi-decade decline, have intensified the debate on their long-run prospects. Are previous trends reversing or will rates revert to low values as current shocks subside? Answering this question requires assessing the underlying forces driving secular interest-rate trends. In … Continue reading Global R*
Fergus Cumming and Danny Walker Bank Rate has risen by more than 5 percentage points in the UK over the past couple of years. This has led to much higher mortgage rates for many people. In this post we analyse another potential source of pressure on mortgagors: the potential for falls in house prices to … Continue reading Why lower house prices could lead to higher mortgage rates
Gabija Zemaityte and Danny Walker Inflation has been high in many countries since 2021. Some have said that companies have increased their profits over that period: so-called ‘greedflation’. We use published company accounts for thousands of large listed companies to look for signs of increased profits in the data. Consistent with previous analysis of aggregate … Continue reading Profits in a time of inflation: what do company accounts say in the UK and euro area?
Julia Giese, Michael McLeay, David Aikman and Sujit Kapadia Central banks have been using a range of monetary policy and macroprudential tools to maintain monetary and financial stability. But when should monetary versus macroprudential tools be used and how should they be combined? Our recent paper develops a macroeconomic model to answer these questions. We … Continue reading Unifying monetary and macroprudential policy
Josh Martin and Julian Reynolds How much have higher import prices increased consumer prices in the UK and euro area? This post explores this question using a framework grounded in some fundamental economic and national accounting concepts. Starting with the GDP price, we adjust for relative import and export prices to arrive at a consumer … Continue reading Has the import price shock been worse in the UK or euro area?