Bank of england

For anyone considering a career in economic forecasting, the Bank of England’s inflation report for August 2007 ought to be required reading. A graph illustrating its Monetary Policy Committee’s ‘best collective judgment’ of annual economic growth two years ahead is fixed around a central prediction of 2.5 per cent, with extreme boundaries of 0.8 per cent and 4.2 per cent. But after two years, economic growth was running at –5.6 per cent, and the economy had just completed its fifth consecutive quarter of negative growth. The finest minds of Threadneedle Street could not see two years ahead. In this case, the Bank of England could not even see a few

Winchester Cathedral, where Jane Austen was laid to rest 200 years ago this week, was the venue chosen for the unveiling of the new £10 bank note, which will feature a portrait of the English novelist. On a humid July day, tourists, pensioners, banknote geeks and a few noisy children packed the aisles. The atmosphere was expectant, as worshippers gathered to get a glimpse of ‘Reverend’ Carney at the pulpit. Smartphones were whipped out as soon as he started speaking. I travelled with my family as an off-duty journalist and was expecting the rather dry and technical explanations favoured by the Bank of England governor in the inflation report. But

I do find it odd that I’m so often having to write about the science of global warming, species extinction and ocean acidification because, though I’ve certainly acquired a pretty useful base knowledge over the years — superior, I’m guessing, to 97 per cent of scientists — it’s really not my main interest. What fascinates me far more is the way the faddish preoccupations of a few green cultists have somehow come to dominate our entire culture, corrupting the intellectual current, suborning institutions, crushing dissent — much as Marxist, fascist and Nazi ideologies did in the 20th century, only with rather more widespread success. Let me give you a recent

For weeks now, an email hoaxer has been trying to catch bank officials out online. After the prankster tricked Barclays boss Jes Staley, they set their sights on a new target: the governor of the Bank of England. Claiming to be Anthony Habgood, chairman of the court of the Bank of England, the hoaxer emailed Mark Carney about reports that Jane Austen would appear on the new £10 banknote, before getting into a conversation about drinking. While Carney did suggest that he was partial to Eddie George’s drinking advice (to have three martinis …before lunch), he can hold his head up high that he shut down the conversation once it took on a somewhat sexist

The BBC made much this week of a recording, from 2008, of one Barclays manager instructing another to submit artificially low rates into the daily interbank Libor fixing because ‘we’ve had some very serious pressure from the UK government and the Bank of England about pushing our Libors lower’. How shocking is that? Well, perhaps not as shocking as it looks — even if it appears to contradict select committee evidence given by the Bank’s former deputy governor, Sir Paul Tucker. The latter part of 2008 saw a liquidity panic in the City, in which the interbank lending market all but froze. Spikes in Libor would have given the impression

The Bank of England is concerned that banks and building societies may have made it too easy to borrow money – and with good reason. Figures released by the Bank today show that household debt is at record levels, with credit card debt increasing at its fastest rate in more than a decade. It’s not difficult to see how this happened. Lenders deluge households with offers of new credit cards, and regularly raise the borrowing levels on existing plastic. There’s a plethora of deals on cards to entice people to switch their debt to new providers and the minimum monthly repayments are often so minuscule that many customers only ever

Charlotte Hogg forgot to tell the Bank of England, of which she had been appointed deputy governor, that her brother Quintin is director of strategy at Barclays bank. She has had to resign. There is something strange about this story. After all, if the Bank of England did not know already that her brother held this position, its knowledge of the banking world it is supposed to supervise must be thin indeed. You can see why Miss Hogg might have assumed that those appointing her knew already, and so have given it no thought, rather as Tony Blair and David Cameron probably never thought to put in the Register of

Tesco chairman John Allan provoked feminist fury by telling would-be non-exec directors, ‘If you’re a white male, tough: you’re an endangered species’ — then claimed he was really trying to make the opposite point, that ‘it’s a great time for women’. But to the contrary, this was a week in which tough white males grabbed the corporate prizes, while one high-flying woman from an oppressed minority was hounded out of her job. First, the blokes. HSBC announced, for the first time in its history and to the satisfaction of governance zealots, the appointment of an outside chairman. Incumbent Douglas Flint is to be succeeded by Mark Tucker, a former professional