The current slump in the UK housing market has coincided with record increases in mortgage arrears and possessions. Falling nominal house prices reduce the amount of unwithdrawn equity in housing and, under certain conditions, provide incentives for borrowers to accumulate arrears and for...

This paper analyses the nominal and real interest rate term structures in the United Kingdom over the fifteen-year period that the UK monetary authorities have pursued an explicit inflation target, using a four-factor essentially affine term structure model. The model imposes no-arbitrage...

Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

This paper reviews the main instruments and associated yield curves that can be used to measure financial market participants' expectations of future UK monetary policy rates. We attempt to evaluate these instruments and curves in terms of their ability to forecast policy rates over the period...

UK asset price reactions to RPI announcements are examined from the early 1980s up to April 1997. Announcements are decomposed into their expected and unexpected components using survey data on inflation expectations. Asset prices do not appear to respond to the expected component of...

During 2004 and 2005, long-horizon interest rates fell sharply in major international government bond markets (Greenspan's "conundrum"). This common fall mainly reflected lower long real rates. To investigate possible causes, the authors apply a no-arbitrage affine modeling framework to...

This paper investigates the impact of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing policy on UK asset prices. Based on analysis of the reaction of financial market prices and modelbased estimates, we find that asset purchases financed by the issuance of central bank reserves - which by February...

During the recent financial crisis the Bank of England, like many other central banks, loosened monetary policy using both conventional and unconventional measures. The main unconventional measure used by the Bank was the policy of asset purchases—mainly of government bonds—financed by the...