In addition, there is limited information on regional consumer prices and how much variation there is in regional inflation rates. 8  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  8  Here in the UK, interest rates were lowered from 5% to 0.5% between September 2008 and March 2009 by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). This took interest rates to their lowest levels in the Bank of England’s over 300-year history. This was augmented with £ of asset purchases between 2009 and 2012, almost exclusively in government securities. In interest-rate equivalent terms, this amounted to a monetary stimulus worth around 7 percentage points. 16  Exceptional times called for exceptional measures. What impact have these exceptional measures had? One simple way to begin to answer that question is to look at how aggregate activity has evolved in the period since. Chart 11a looks at the growth in inflation-adjusted GDP per head across the UK regions since the MPC’s monetary stimulus was put in place. All regions have experienced a rise in nominal GDP per head over that period, averaging 12%. Not all regions have experienced an inflation-adjusted increase, with growth strongest in London (a rise of 6.6%) and weakest in Northern Ireland (a contraction of 4.6%). Unemployment rates rose sharply during the financial crisis. But they have since fallen across every region in the UK since 2011 and by roughly similar amounts, on average 3 percentage points (Chart 12a).
One Car, Two Car, Red Car, Blue Car Speech given by Andrew G Haldane, Chief Economist, Bank of England  Materials Processing Institute, Redcar 2 December 2016  The views are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Monetary Policy Committee. I would like to thank Mauricio Armellini, Sandra Batten, David Bradnum, Ben Broadbent, Angelina Carvalho, Fergus Cumming, Jeremy Franklin, Alex Haberis, Andrew Hebden, Gabor Pinter, Alice Pugh, Tom Smith, Gertjan Vlieghe, Matt Waldron and Chris Yeates for comments and contributions. The title draws its inspiration from “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” by Dr Seuss, a children’s book first published in 1960, whose use of simple language contains an important lesson for economists like me. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx  As someone whose family hails from the North-East, and who themselves was born in the North-East, it is wonderful to be here in Redcar. Regional visits like this are crucial for the Bank of England. They enable us to take the temperature of the local economy by speaking to a broad cross-section of businesses, charities, social enterprises, schools, further and higher education institutions and trade unions. Here in the North-East, it is clear the temperature of the local economy is not as high as either you or I would wish. Despite having come down rapidly over recent years, the unemployment rate, at over 6%, is still higher than for any other region in the UK.