This paper offers a critique of the UK government's Medium Term Financial Strategy from a policy optimization perspective. It argues that recent versions of the MTFS can be interpreted as representing the outcome of a policy optimization exercise, but that certain key aspects remain unclear....

In this paper we examine the sectoral demand for U.K. gilt-edged securities. The Tobin-Markowitz model of portfolio choice generates the prediction that asset holdings should be negatively correlated with the own price, and positively correlated with the prices of major substitutes. In contrast,...