Abstract
The Bank of England, founded in 1694 to finance war against France, soon became Britain’s largest bank. It became responsible for maintaining the gold standard and acting as lender of last resort. To do so, it had to withdraw from commercial banking. After failing to stay on gold (1931) the Bank became subservient to the Chancellor in macro-monetary policy and was nationalized in 1946. Operational independence to set interest rates in pursuit of an inflation target was restored in the 1990s, while its previous functions, notably bank supervision, debt management, and foreign exchange intervention, fell away.
Keywords
- Bagehot, W.
- Bank for International Settlements
- Bank of England
- Bank of Scotland
- Bank rate
- Banking crises
- Banking supervision
- Basel Committee on Banking Regulation and Supervisory Practices
- Big Bang
- Bretton Woods system
- Bullion
- Central bank independence
- Central banking
- Cost-push theory of inflation
- Dutch East India Company
- European Monetary System
- Exchange controls
- Exchange rate mechanism
- Exchange rate targets
- Financial intermediaries
- Financial liberalization
- Financial repression
- Financial Services Authority
- Friedman, M.
- Gold standard
- Incomes policies
- Inflation
- Inflation targeting
- London Clearing House
- Medium Term Financial Strategy (UK)
- Monetarism
- Monetary policy
- Monetary targets
- Natural rate of unemployment
- Phillips curve
- Radcliffe Report
- Royal Bank of Scotland
- South Sea Company
- Stagflation
- Thornton, H.
- Trade unions
- Treasury bills
- Velocity of circulation
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Goodhart, C.A.E. (2018). Bank of England. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2405
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2405
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