Selling England (no longer) by the pound: currency-mismatches and the dollarisation of UK exports

Marco Garofalo, Giovanni Rosso and Roger Vicquery

Most international trade is denominated in dominant currencies such as the US dollar. What explains the adoption of dominant currency pricing and what are its macroeconomic implications? In a recent paper, we explore a rare instance of transition in aggregate export invoicing patterns. In the aftermath of the depreciation that followed the Brexit referendum in 2016, UK exporters progressively shifted to invoicing most of their exports in dollars, rather than in pounds. This was driven by firms more exposed to currency mismatches, eg exporting in pounds but importing in dollars before the depreciation. As a result of this aggregate transition to dollar pricing, a dollar appreciation now depresses demand for UK exports by twice as much than before 2016.

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The link between mortgage debt servicing burdens and arrears: is there a critical threshold?

Nuri Khayal and Jonathan Loke

Many households in the UK have seen their mortgage payments go up since mortgage rates started to increase in 2022. In the current environment of higher rates, the question of how much a household can comfortably spend on their mortgage payments before getting into financial distress is particularly relevant. This blog shows that households which spend a larger share of their income on mortgage payments are at a higher risk of being in arrears. But in contrast to pre-existing work on the subject, we do not find evidence of a critical threshold after which the risk increases much more sharply. These findings imply that changes in the indebtedness across the whole mortgagor population, not just the tail, matter for financial stability.

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Leverage finds a way: a comparison of US Treasury basis trading and the LDI event

Adam Brinley Codd, Daniel Krause, Pierre Ortlieb and Alex Briers

We both drive cars, but the US drives on the right while the UK drives on the left. We both walk, but we do so on sidewalks in the US and pavements in the UK. We both have asset managers, who want to take leveraged positions in interest rates. US asset managers had around US$650 billion of long treasury futures in June 2023. UK asset managers, in Autumn 2022, held around £200 billion in leveraged repo. However, the ways in which the financial system found willing lenders for these borrowers, and intermediated the risk through the system of market-based finance, differ.

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Leveraging language models for prudential supervision

Adam Muhtar and Dragos Gorduza

Imagine a world where machines can assist humans in navigating across complex financial rules. What was once far-fetched is rapidly becoming reality, particularly with the emergence of a class of deep learning models based on the Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al (2017)), representing a whole new paradigm to language modelling in recent times. These models form the bedrock of revolutionary technologies like large language models (LLMs), opening up new ways for regulators, such as the Bank of England, to analyse text data for prudential supervision and regulation.

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Quantifying the macroeconomic impact of geopolitical risk

Julian Reynolds

Policymakers and market participants consistently cite geopolitical developments as a key risk to the global economy and financial system. But how can one quantify the potential macroeconomic effects of these developments? Applying local projections to a popular metric of geopolitical risk, I show that geopolitical risk weighs on GDP in the central case and increases the severity of adverse outcomes. This impact appears much larger in emerging market economies (EMEs) than advanced economies (AEs). Geopolitical risk also pushes up inflation in both central case and adverse outcomes, implying that macroeconomic policymakers have to trade-off stabilising output versus inflation. Finally, I show that geopolitical risk may transmit to output and inflation via trade and uncertainty channels.

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Three facts about the rising number of UK business exits

Jelle Barkema, Maren Froemel and Sophie Piton

Record-high firm exits make headlines, but who are the firms going out of business? This post documents three facts about the rising number of corporations dissolving using granular data from Companies House and the Insolvency Service. We show that the increase in dissolutions that have already materialised reflected a catch-up following Covid and was concentrated among firms started during Covid. While these firms were small and had a limited macroeconomic impact, firms currently in the process of dissolving are larger. Their exit might therefore be more material from a macroeconomic perspective. We also discuss how the recent economic environment could contribute to further rises in dissolutions and particularly insolvencies in the future that could have more material macroeconomic impact.

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To the lower bound and back: measuring UK monetary conditions

Natalie Burr, Julian Reynolds and Mike Joyce

Monetary policymakers have a number of tools they can use to influence monetary conditions, in order to maintain price stability. While central banks typically favour short-term policy rates as their primary instrument, when policy rates remained constrained at near-zero levels following the global financial crisis (GFC), many central banks – including the Bank of England – turned to unconventional policies to further ease monetary conditions. How can the combined effect of these policies be measured? This post presents one possible metric – a Monetary Conditions Index – that uses a data-driven approach to summarise information from a range of variables related to the conduct of UK monetary policy. We discuss what this implies about how UK monetary conditions have evolved since the GFC.

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The transmission channels of geopolitical risk

Samuel Smith and Marco Pinchetti

Recent events in the Middle East, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have sparked renewed interest in the consequences of geopolitical tensions for global economic developments. In this post, we argue that geopolitical risk (GPR) can transmit via two separate and intrinsically different channels: (i) a deflationary macro channel, and (ii) an inflationary energy channel. We then use a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) framework to evaluate these channels empirically. Our estimates suggest that GPR shocks can place downward or upward pressure on advanced economy price levels depending on which of the two channels the shock propagates through.

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Flow of funds and the UK real economy

Laura Achiro, Gerry Gunner and Neha Bora

A flow of funds framework is a way of understanding and tracking the movement of financial assets between different sectors of the economy. This blog specifically analyses UK corporate and household sectoral flows from 2000 to the present and highlights how this framework can reveal useful trends and signals for policymakers about the real economy. For instance, the accumulation of debt in the pre-global financial crisis (GFC) era by households and corporates was a warning signal that indicated several potential risks and vulnerabilities in the economy, including overleveraging and asset price inflation.

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Markup matters: monetary policy works through aspirations

Tim Willems and Rick van der Ploeg

Since the post-Covid rise in inflation has been accompanied by strong wage growth, interactions between wage and price-setters, each wishing to attain a certain markup, have regained prominence. In our recently published Staff Working Paper, we ask how monetary policy should be conducted amid, what has been referred to as, a ‘battle of the markups’. We find that countercyclicality in aspired price markups (‘sellers’ inflation’) calls for more dovish monetary policy. Empirically, we however find markups to be procyclical for most countries, in which case tighter monetary policy is the appropriate response to above-target inflation.

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