Financial institutions

Exchange of letters between the Governor and the Chancellor

This Market Notice outlines the Bank Executive’s approach to implementing the Monetary Policy Committee’s (MPC) decision to unwind the gilts held for monetary policy purposes in the Asset Purchase Facility (APF). As part of this, Bank APF auctions will be paused while the Bank reviews a model of selling gilts to the Government.

We develop a direct approach to incorporating survey density forecasts into model-based predictive distributions. Histogram forecasts from the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) carry rich nonparametric information about expected outcomes, but existing methods rely on moment-based approximations that discard part of it. We instead tilt entropically to the histogram probabilities themselves, matching them exactly.

Estimates of potential output and the output gap are widely used in monetary, fiscal and structural policy analysis, but they are unobservable and subject to substantial real-time uncertainty. This paper examines revisions to output gap and potential growth estimates produced by the European Commission, the Eurosystem, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for the euro area and its member countries.