In any case, as a breach of the threshold becomes imminent, it seems likely that the Committee will wish to provide further guidance on the future determinants of policy in order to reduce any uncertainty surrounding our reaction function. Can we say anything yet about the effectiveness of the introduction of forward guidance? As already noted, the primary objective is to give confidence to business and households that policy will not be tightened until there is a material reduction in economic slack (assuming that neither price nor financial stability are threatened) and to prevent an excessive snapback in market interest rates taking place simply because a recovery is under way. As far as the broad message to businesses and households goes, contacts of the Bank’s Agents suggest that businesses have got the message that the MPC will only begin to tighten policy once the recovery is entrenched and slack has been materially reduced. And in the period after the MPC’s announcement, the Markit Household Finance Index suggested that households expected Bank Rate to rise later than before, although the date has since come back in again, perhaps reflecting the continued flow of positive data. At first sight, the evidence from market interest rates is more equivocal. Chart 5 shows the instantaneous forward yield curve in May, August and today. Yields have risen substantially since May. On the face of it, that appears to suggest that the guidance has not been very effective at influencing the expectations of market participants.
(2016) document similar patterns in real interest rates around the world. 6. Within our central framework for understanding its determinants, R* is the price that equilibrates supply and demand in the capital market. On one side of the market, households accumulate wealth and use capital as a means of storing that wealth. Households’ accumulation of wealth is the result of their desire to smooth lifetime consumption. On the other side of the market, firms require capital to produce. They choose the optimal quantity of capital to use, equalising the marginal costs and marginal returns. See Bank of England (2018) for details. 7. See Cesa-Bianchi et al. (2022). 8. Estimates of the underlying trends in the structural factors that drive Global R* are obtained for 1950–2015. The trends are extracted using a statistical filter and to avoid so-called ‘end point’ problems the latest data are omitted. Given the frequency of the releases of some data series and because the model focuses on a five-year real interest rate, the sample period therefore ends in 2015. See Cesa-Bianchi et al. (2022) for details. 9. The table also shows that varying the simulation assumptions results in simulations that imply falls in Global R* that vary between 1.1 and 3.3 percentage points. 10. As shown in Cesa-Bianchi et al. (2022), the dynamic paths of the structural model simulation and statistical estimate differ more in other parts of the sample period, so do not imply exactly that same change in Global R* over all subsamples. 11.