The Controversial Approach of the Bank of England - Essay Example

This report presents a critical overview of the approaches adopted by the Bank for the sake of economic recovery in the country. Considering the devastating effects of the recent financial crisis, the Bank of England considered it essential to improve liquidity position through initiating “liquidity support operations” (Joyce). The intention behind these operations was to facilitate interbank market with more readily available funds. The Bank, in this regard, outstretched its normal operations by way of enabling commercial banks to obtain funds more easily.

In addition to these initiatives, the Bank also considered other measures, such as, the introduction of “Special Liquidity Scheme” which enabled banks to exchange their assets with T-bills, which otherwise could not be materialized on short notice. This facility later was referred to as the “Discount Window Facility” (Joyce). However, these policies were brought into action after the Bank loosened the monetary policy by way of lowering down interest rates significantly. Although, the purchase of public and private assets was termed as a policy measure by the Bank, but in fact, these actions were forced to be taken by the Bank since the earlier loosening of monetary policy came out to be ineffective in achieving the 2 percent rate of inflation (Joyce, Tong and Woods). . The growth trends in the UK economy from the first quarter have all been recorded in negative, i.e. – 0.

1 percent, - 1.2 percent, 0 percent, - 1.4 percent, - 0.5 percent and – 1.3 percent. On the other hand, like other sectors of economy, the output of the construction sector of the UK declined significantly by 5.2 percent during the second quarter of the current fiscal year (Richards). According to the critics, the public and private assets purchasing policy of the bank proved to be detrimental itself for the economy as the Bank of England swapped financial assets with the commercial banks so as to increase the backup reserves of the banks, which could be used to further increase their lending operations in the market.

But on the other side, the loosening of monetary policy and decline in interest rates meant that the deposits made by public in the bank were valueless. Moreover, the lowering down of interest rates also decreased the targets for businesses in the UK which were set in relation to the returns expected on equity and capital of the firms. At the same time, it was also expected that the increased inflation rates would turn into increased demand and thus such increase in demand would lead to economic revival in the UK and would also improve lending operations in the UK financial market (Auerback).

However, things went opposite to what was expected; as reported in the recent publication of the British Bankers Association, the mortgage lending for the month of June came out to be ? 7.2 billion, which if compared with the latest semi-annual averages was less than by ? 0.8 billion. Further, forecasting of mortgage lending shows that this declining trend