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
Monetary Policy
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?
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
Harvey Daniell and Andre Moreira The latest developments in the labour market are often central to monetary policy decisions. We outline a framework for mapping labour market indicators to near-term employment and pay growth, drawing on established insights from the ‘nowcasting’ literature. The key benefits of our approach are: the ability to map a range … Continue reading Forecasting near-term trends in the labour market
Tomas Key During the recovery from the Covid pandemic, the demand for workers rose to unprecedented levels in the UK. The number of jobs that firms were looking to fill increased to 1.3 million in the middle of 2022, 60% higher than the level in the last three months of 2019. The amount of job … Continue reading How have recent changes to the demand for workers affected the unemployment rate?
Marcus Buckmann, Galina Potjagailo and Philip Schnattinger Understanding the origins of currently high inflation is a challenge, since the effects from a range of large shocks are layered on top of each other. The rise of UK service price inflation to up to 6.9% in April might potentially reflect external shocks propagating to a wider … Continue reading Dissecting UK service inflation via a neural network Phillips curve
Ivan Yotzov, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Ozgen Ozturk and Gregory Thwaites Since late 2021, annual CPI inflation in the UK increased sharply. Alongside this increase, there was also a significant rise in firm and household short-term inflation expectations. In this post, we use data from the Decision Maker Panel (DMP), a UK-wide monthly … Continue reading Firm inflation perceptions and expectations: evidence from the Decision Maker Panel
Ambrogio Cesa-Bianchi, Ed Hall, Marco Pinchetti and Julian Reynolds The remarkable stability of US inflation dynamics in the pre-Covid era had led many to think that the Phillips Curve had flattened. However, the sharp rise in inflation that followed the Covid-19 pandemic ignited a debate on whether the Phillips Curve had steepened and, in particular, … Continue reading Did supply constraints tilt the Phillips Curve?