I then want to say something about the importance of personal financial education. There are two distinct parts to the strategy. One involves visits to secondary schools. Below director level, more than 400 people working at the Bank have volunteered as “Ambassadors”, who explain to school pupils what we do and why. People on our policy Committees do the same. It’s now rare that, on one of my regular trips around the country to hear from businesses about what’s going on in the economy, I don’t also make a visit to a local school. In all, we reckon we’ve talked to 12% of the UK’s state secondary schools in the past 18 months alone. 2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches  2  For our part, we very much enjoy these visits. And the feedback has also been good. Central banks are not often associated with the words “positive”, “appreciated” and “inspiring” so you can imagine how invigorated our Ambassadors are when they hear them. The second strand is a package of online materials – something we’ve named “EconoME” – to help non-specialist teachers of students aged between 11-16 years deliver quality financial education. EconoME comprises three one-hour lessons focussing on financial decision-making and the implications of these decisions on students and the world around them. The resource draws on real-world examples, provided by the Bank of England, which shows how the Bank makes decisions and the practical skills we employ to understand the likely outcomes of those decisions.
Market finance and financial stability: will the stretch cause a strain? Speech given by Alex Brazier, Executive Director for Financial Stability Strategy and Risk, Bank of England  The Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis, Imperial College Business School, London Thursday 1 February 2018  I am grateful to Stephen Burgess, Shibo Feng, Harry Goodacre, Nowrin Hossain, Mike Joyce, Christiane Kneer, Javier Otegui, Liam Crowley-Reidy, Marek Rojicek and Ryland Thomas for their assistance in preparing these remarks. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  We’ve now passed the tenth anniversary of the onset of the global financial crisis; a crisis created by a fragile financial system out of a correction in the US housing market. What could have been an economic downturn was turned into a disaster. In this country alone, more than one million people lost their jobs. And the legacy of those effects lives on today in lower levels of national income. Looking back over the decade, the economic cost of the crisis has been equivalent to £ per person in the UK. 1  Such crises should be remembered, and their anniversaries marked, because forgetting them risks repeating them. In this country, Parliament hard wired the memory of the crisis into the institutional fabric. It tasked the Bank of England with meeting a ‘macroprudential’ objective. Cutting through the language of the statute, it is to guard against the financial system disrupting growth of the wider economy; to guard against it turning corrections and downturns into crises and disasters.