Bank of england

When the Bank of England is not indulging employees with the kind of taxpayer-funded hospitality that would make a bailed-out banker blush, its lofty and unelected officials might like to consider how they could help us ordinary mortals in the new year.  It has emerged that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street spent nearly £100,000 of our money on its annual summer party, just weeks after the Brexit vote tossed the country into economic and political turmoil.  Following a Freedom of Information request, the central bank admitted that it lavished more than £94,500 (excluding VAT) on food, entertainment and the venue for the Governors’ Day event, with nearly another £4,500

The currency has been devalued by more than 30 per cent. Interest rates have been pushed all the way up to 20 per cent. The IMF is standing by with an emergency package, and capital controls and dollar rationing have been maintained. It has been a heck of a morning for the pound – although, fortunately enough for most us, the Egyptian rather than British one. Over here, it has all been rather quieter. The Bank of England, as most people expected, has stuck with its decision over the summer to take rates all the way down to the 0.25 per cent. It now looks inevitable that it will hold

Mark Carney’s decision to stay on as Bank of England Governor until 2019 has been widely welcomed. But not everyone is happy about the news. The Daily Mail accuses Carney of being a ‘posturing governor’ and says the staging of his announcement yesterday was in line with much of his conduct: ‘designed to generate maximum publicity’. The paper says that while some were concerned at the possibility of uncertainty in the markets if he’d walked away, would it be any worse than ‘his relentless doom-mongering’? The Mail suggests Carney will be forever tainted by his conduct during the referendum, which it says was at its worst when he joined in with George Osborne’s

Oh dear. Mark Carney is irritated. His proud independence has been challenged. The Prime Minister had the temerity to admit that she was not altogether thrilled with his ‘super-low’ interest rates and quantitative easing. These policies meant that people with assets got richer, she pointed out. ‘People without them suffered… People with savings have found themselves poorer.’ Mr Carney found this intolerable and haughtily rebuffed her, saying, ‘The policies are done by technocrats. We are not going to take instruction on our policies from the political side.’ Back in your box, Mrs May. Carney’s in charge! As they clash, it is increasingly hard to remember what a bright day it

Is satire dying? Zoe Williams asks in the Guardian whether the shrinking of permissible speech is killing comedy. To make her point, she wonders if the mid-1990s satire The Day Today would be tolerated in 2016 and whether ‘its surrealism belongs to another age’. The spoof news show, which in some ways seems slightly prophetic 20 years later, was sometimes edgy, and often surreal, and Williams recalls one scene in which a presenter announces in a dead pan manner that the Bank of England had issued ‘an emergency currency based on the Queen’s eggs, several thousand of which were removed from her ovaries in 1953 and held in reserve’. But, as she says: ‘If you told

It takes quite a determined Cassandra to see the rise in Consumer Prices Index (CPI) from 0.6 per cent in August to one per cent in September as some kind of crisis, not that that will stop the holdouts of the Remain campaign from trying to do so. When CPI fell below one per cent at the end of 2014, you might remember, there were dark warnings about the threat of deflation – with the horrors that would imply for borrowers, who would see the real value of their debts increase. Now, some are trying to present a rise to one per cent as bad news, with former Monetary Policy

If only all my stories had as much impact. My interview with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, sent shockwaves around the world’s currency markets. The Canadian was just three months into his new role as Britain’s most powerful unelected official when he visited Leeds to explain the central bank’s then new policy of forward guidance to a group of business leaders at the offices of one of the city’s Big Six law firms. In person, Carney was smooth, confident and assured, just as you would expect from someone who spent his formative years at Goldman Sachs. I had 10 minutes with the Governor, who was accompanied

The TUC general secretaryFrances O’Grady doesn’t get a lot of airtime. Compared with predecessors a generation ago, such as Vic Feather and Len Murray, she is all but invisible. But in her Congress speech at Brighton on Monday, she struck a note that must have resonated with many of the public who have no idea who she is when she spoke of ‘greedy businesses that treat workers like animals’. She was referring to zero-hours contracts, below-minimum-wage rates such as those effectively paid at Sports Direct’s Shirebrook warehouse, and rock-bottom fees per delivery offered to self-employed Hermes parcel-van drivers and Deliveroo fast-food couriers. And of course anyone not fundamentally opposed to

How does Mark Carney feel about his ‘Project Fear’ warnings in the run-up to the referendum? His mild-mannered nemesis Jacob Rees-Mogg probably wouldn’t have been prepared for the Bank of England Governor’s choice of words to describe his mood. Carney was ‘serene’ about how he handled himself before Brexit, he told the Treasury Select Committee this afternoon. But Carney didn’t stop there: he also did his best to bait Rees-Mogg, who has clashed with Carney several times before at these hearings, suggesting the session was being wasted ‘going through counterfactuals’. He then went on to slap down any suggestion from the Tory MP that his warnings had been ‘dire’. Yet

What should we think about negative interest rates? What kind of Alice in Wonderland world are we living in when companies and households are paid to borrow and charged if they save? Seemingly crazy, negative interest rates are spreading nonetheless. Implemented by central banks in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, they now apply in countries accounting for a quarter of the global economy. Should we be worried? Could we see negative rates in Britain? Earlier this month, the Bank of England cut interest rates for the first time in seven years, from 0.5 per cent to a new record low of 0.25 per cent. Quantitative easing was also restarted, with the