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....

This paper offers a critique of the macroeconomic policy stance of the U.K. Conservative administration from a policy optimization perspective. Attention is focused on three particular issues which, it is argued, require clarification in the medium term financial strategy. The first concerns the...

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,...