BoE holds rates, ECB next

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee today voted to maintain the official Bank Rate paid on commercial bank reserves at 0.5%.

The Committee also voted to continue with its programme of asset purchases totalling £275 billion financed by the issuance of central bank reserves.

The Committee expects the announced programme to take another two months to complete. The scale of the programme will be kept under review.

The minutes of the meeting will be published at 9.30am on Wednesday 21 December.

Bank of England should buy UK bank bonds

If the Bank of England wants to help bring down UK banks’ funding costs so as to ease credit to the economy, maybe it should start buying UK bank bonds.

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How ECB quantitative easing might work

One answer might be for the European Central Bank to begin quantitative easing in the name of monetary policy transmission to stave off deflation, rather than of capping government bond yields or anything else that smacks of financing governments

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Confidence plummets in UK financial system

Bank of England (BoE) delivers worrying results from its Systemic Risk Survey.

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