These prevented it from efficiently and safely channelling savings between those parts of the country with a financial surplus to the booming industrial areas of the north and the midlands that needed finance for investment. These constraints included the Bank of England’s monopoly position as the only limited liability bank in the country allowed to issue bank notes and its lack of any presence outside London. 11  See Inflation Report, February 2017, Bank of England, available at: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/inflationreport/2017/feb.aspx. 14  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  14  The Government of the day therefore offered the Bank the choice between losing its monopoly or establishing branches. Parliament’s response, however, was to legislate for both in order to improve financial liquidity throughout the country and provide for a more efficient intermediation of savings for investment. This enabled both the establishment of the Bank’s Birmingham branch and the Midland Bank that Charles Geach helped to start in 1836 – one of the first new joint stock banks, in competition with the Bank of England. The Bank of England has long since given up its private banking role in the financing of the economy. But the efficiency and soundness of the mechanisms for channeling savings to investment remain a key element in the delivery of our now, exclusively public, responsibility to safeguard monetary and financial stability. Today, monetary and financial stability is the most important contribution the Bank can make to stable, productive investment.
This weakness is consistent with survey indicators of 9  For example, Guiso, L, Sapienza, P and Zingales, L (2013), 'Time Varying Risk', NBER Working Paper 19284. Guiso et al use a survey of Italian investors and find that the proportion of individuals unwilling to take any financial risk had increased from 18% in 2007 to 42% in 2009 and put this down to emotional response (fear) triggered by a scary experience. 10 See Nagel, S and Malmendier, U (2011) ' Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk Taking?, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol126(1), pp373-416. Kunreuther, H., R. Ginsberg, L. Miller, P. Sagi, P. Slovic, B. Borkan, and N. Katz (1978). Disaster Insurance Protection: Public Policy Lessons. Wiley Interscience. Bernile, G., Bhagwat, V., & Rau, P. R. (2017) 'What doesn’t kill you will only make you more risk-loving: Early-life disasters and CEO behavior', The Journal of Finance, Vol.72(1), pp167-206. 13  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  13  investment intentions which remain subdued and elevated uncertainty, as detailed in the February 2017 Inflation Report. 11  By the end of the forecast, the level of business investment is around 20% lower than in the Monetary Policy Committee's May 2016 forecast. Our latest estimate of year-on-year business investment growth in the fourth quarter of 2016 is already around six percentage points weaker than our projection in May.