24 research outputs found
Markets and operations: 2010 Q2
This article reviews developments in sterling financial markets since the 2010 Q1 Quarterly Bulletin up to 21 May 2010. The article also reviews the Bankâs official operations.
Markets and operations 2009 Q4
This article reviews developments in sterling financial markets since the 2009 Q3 Quarterly Bulletin up to end-November 2009. The article also reviews the Bankâs official operations.
Corporate âexcessesâ and financial market dynamics
The recent corporate failures in the US and in Europe have considerably damaged investorsâ confidence in the functioning of financial markets and the ability of the regulatory framework to safeguard their interest and prevent fraud. These episodes demonstrate that market failures exist, which can undermine the effectiveness of market discipline to ensure the appropriate allocation of capital. Specifically the paper considers four particular features of financial markets that may have given rise to market failures: (a) perverse incentives/conflict of interests, (b) destabilising trading/investment strategies, (c) lack of disclosure/transparency and (d) concentrated versus fragmented ownership structures. The paper reviews the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence related to these four possible types of market failures, illustrating these with evidence drawn from the most recent corporate scandals. The last part of the paper is devoted to the policy responses both in the US and in Europe to prevent these failures.
Markets and operations: 2010 Q3
This article reviews developments in sterling financial markets, including the Bankâs official operations, since the 2010 Q2 Quarterly Bulletin up to 27 August 2010. The article also summarises market intelligence on selected topical issues relating to market functioning.
Markets and operations - 2009 Q3
This article reviews developments in global financial markets since the 2009 Q2 Quarterly Bulletin up to end-August 2009. The article also reviews the Bankâs official operations.
Interpreting recent movements in sterling
The sterling effective exchange rate has depreciated significantly since the start of the financial market crisis in August 2007. Movements in sterling affect UK monetary policy via their potential impacts on CPI inflation prospects, where it is important to consider the reasons behind the change in the exchange rate. Sterlingâs movements potentially reflect a wide range of factors in the United Kingdom and overseas, in both the real economy and in financial markets. Indicative evidence suggests that sterlingâs depreciation reflected a combination of perceived changes to UK relative cyclical prospects, the perceived riskiness of UK assets and the apparent need for the UK economy to rebalance, the effects of which may have been amplified by financial market factors. But there is substantial uncertainty about the precise role of each factor.
LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in
the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of
science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will
have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is
driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking
an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and
mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at
Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m
effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel
camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second
exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given
night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000
square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5
point-source depth in a single visit in will be (AB). The
project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations
by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg with
, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, ,
covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time
will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a
18,000 deg region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the
anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to . The
remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a
Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products,
including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion
objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures
available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie
The provisioning experience of the major UK banks: a small panel investigation
Using panel regression analysis, the factors that may help to explain increases in loan-loss provisions for the major UK banks are investigated. Explanatory variables reviewed include aggregate variables such as GDP growth as well as bank-specific factors such as the composition of the loan portfolio. The main findings are that a number of macroeconomic variables can indeed inform about banks' provisions, in particular real GDP growth, real interest rates and lagged aggregate lending growth. Bank-specific behaviour is also important - increased lending to riskier sectors, such as commercial property companies, has generally been associated with higher provisions.