The Bank of England's Megan Greene on Monetary Policy in a World of Supply Shocks

Introduction

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Host Introduction

1:51Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, you know one nice thing about getting old?

2:08Go on. I've been thinking about this a lot, actually. The nice thing about getting old is that a lot of people that you have known for a very long time and that you've sort of grown up with, let's say, over the years, start to get into really interesting positions and sometimes senior positions or sometimes positions of power. I love this take. Right. Yeah. There are certain people that you don't get to know or you're, you know, when you're in your 20s or whatever, your peers or your peers, and that's great, but they probably aren't, for example, external members

2:42of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and so forth or other such roles. But as you get senior, you're like, oh, wow, I know that person. I recognize that name. As you guys like to say who went to university in London, I went to uni with that person. My impression is that everyone in London, quote, went to uni with literally everyone else because I've heard you and Sid say that specific phrase so many times over the last decade. No, not that often, surely. But you're absolutely right.

Megan Green Introduction

3:10You've sort of given the guest away. We're going to be speaking with someone that we've known for a long time. And I think a lot of people have known her for a long time from her very public role on finance Twitter. That's right. As they say, and also in various columns in different media organizations. And professional roles. And professional roles. Yeah. To me, she will always be a member of finance Twitter. That's right. But yes, various professional roles. And now she is, in fact, an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. And it's a really interesting time,

Monetary Policy Discussion

3:41of course, to be talking about monetary policy. I mean, I would say it's an interesting time. It's always an interesting time to be talking about monetary policy. But I would say it's a particularly interesting time because I could list several reasons for that. So obviously, we are still in the wake of the incredible inflation wave that we had post-COVID. And at least in much of the world, inflation has not returned to target. In fact, in some countries, the rate hike cycle has begun. So there's still the live issue. There is the shifting political situation in many countries in which the

4:15very premise of like, well, how much independence should the central bank have to operate is being re-discussed. And it is, in fact, local elections in the UK right now. That's right. We're speaking during a week about local elections. And then, of course, COVID, shock, maybe transitory or one-off thing. Governor Christopher Waller in the U.S., he had a good speech recently called one transitory shock after another. Of course, in this case, alluding to the war in Iran. And so what does the price in oil and so forth mean for inflation? There are so many interesting questions

4:46right now for anyone in the seat of a monetary policymaker. So much. And also the interaction

Bond Market Interaction

4:52between monetary policy and the bond market as well, right? So we're recording this, I feel I have to say this for every episode now, on May 6. Yesterday, we saw the 30-year UK guilt yield hit its highest since 1998. And that was after the BOE decision from last week to actually hold interest rates. So there's a tension there. Anyway, we have so much to talk about. So much. Truly the perfect guest. We are, of course, going to be speaking with Megan Green. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Megan. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you guys again. It's very, very fun. Very

5:24nostalgic. What's it like to go from, I guess, thinking and writing and tweeting about economics to actually practicing economics. Yeah, setting economic policy. Yeah. So first of all, I love that you guys think of me as finance Twitter. Core, core, old school. Certainly was not paying any of my bills over the years. Now, sadly, my Twitter account is relegated mostly to baseball commentary. Understand. Go Red Sox. But, you know, it's very different to go from kind of analyzing and forecasting what central bankers will do to being a central banker and, you know, making the sausage

5:58myself. So it's a very different position with a whole lot more responsibility.

MPC Role Explanation

6:04We like talking to Americans who have served on the MPC. Who's made it. Yeah. Well, we've done, you know, Adam Posen has been on the show a bunch of times. So, you know, it's plausible that you and I could be MPC members. What is your role? What does it mean to be an external member of the MPC at the BOE? Yeah. So that's a great question. And the Bank of England is pretty unique for its setup this way. So the Monetary Policy Committee, which meets every six weeks and votes on interest rates is comprised of nine people. Five are so-called internals and four are so-called externals. And the

6:35internal members are the governor, the deputy governors and the chief economists. Some of them grew up at the Bank of England. Some of them didn't. Some of them came in. But they're all part of the executive. And then the four external members of the MPC, of which I'm one, quite intentionally came from outside the bank. And what that means exactly is, you know, differs in every case. So it could be from outside the industry entirely. It could be from outside the country, as you can tell from my accent. And also from my background, I'm a little bit of both, although actually I'm also British. So I'm not sure how they're. Yeah. By passport. I'm not sure how they're classifying me. But there's always

7:07been an American, actually, on the MPC. It's not a rule. I didn't know that. So you and Adam aren't the first. No. So there have been. Yeah, there have been others. But the idea is just to have to quite intentionally bring in different perspectives. The external members sit in a different part of the bank from the internal members so that we don't all collude and get stuck in groupthink. So the idea is to have different perspectives. I come from the private sector. Many members of

BOE Mandate Discussion

7:31the MPC come from academia. So I bring kind of the business environment, corporate side of things, and also from outside the country. So I spend a lot of time looking at international spillovers. You can see in my speeches how the UK is affected by things happening in the US and the Eurozone, for example. So the idea is to just fight groupthink. And you can see that often in our votes, right? We're also unique for reporting who voted for what every time. And so you can see what the vote split is. There's no figuring out which dot is who.

8:02So in the US they report, but I guess in the Europe they don't, right? So you don't actually get those vote counts or you don't know who, if they dissented or what. That's right. People can out themselves if they want to. But at the Bank of England, we're fully transparent about all of that. And so you can see that often there are dissents. In fact, after the last Fed vote, I had a number of friends say, gosh, the Fed looks a lot like the NPC right now because there were four dissents. It's quite normal to have dissents at the Bank of England, which is pretty different from most major central banks. But it's all part of this idea of sort of personal accountability for your votes and having different perspectives

8:35on a committee. You kind of anticipated my next question, but how much of your role is viewed as sort of explaining perhaps US monetary policy and its potential impact on the UK versus actually analyzing the UK and having to know that particular economy. And, you know, when you first joined the MPC, did they hand you like a UK economic handbook that you had to like get up to speed on? So no, there was no handbook, but I did have to get up to speed pretty quickly, including up to speed

9:07with kind of the data in the UK, which is quite different from the US. But my role really is about looking at the UK economy, trying to understand what's going on, but also understanding how there are spillovers from other places. So by way of example, before the pandemic, when the gilt yield curve moved, about a third of that move was usually from outside the UK entirely. So from mostly from the US and also the eurozone. Since the pandemic, it's been about half of the moves in our yield curve. So financial conditions are affected pretty significantly by what we have absolutely no control over

9:40whatsoever at the Bank of England. But it's important to understand how those spillovers might happen. You also have spillovers via trade, which obviously we've looked into a whole bunch through the past year, given tariffs and economic statecraft. It occurs to me, well, I actually don't, what is the BOE's mandate? Of course, in the US, it's the famous dual mandate. My understanding is the ECB is a more ostensibly singularly price mandate. What is the BOE's mandate? Yeah, so our mandate is to achieve price stability of 2% inflation sustainably over the medium term,

10:11and then subject to that to support the goals of the government. But it really is, whereas the Fed does have a dual mandate, we really have one primary mandate, and the rest is secondary to that. How would you characterize the health of the UK economy at the moment? And Joe and I get to ask

UK Economy Health

10:28this very basic question, because we don't live here. And you know, we see the headlines that everyone else does. We see headlines about energy shocks, trade and tariffs, as you mentioned. But then we walk around the city and things seem pretty crowded, and people seem to be eating out and shopping. In central London, where the tourists go, things look plenty active to me. That's right. How would you describe it at the moment? Yeah, particularly on a Tuesday through a Thursday, less so on a Monday or Friday, people aren't necessarily coming into the office. Look, the UK economy has been pretty weak. It's

10:59been weak since I started this role three years ago. And the question is why it's so weak. And most economists, you guys included, I imagine, think of the economy through the demand side, because that's what we were all taught for generations to just think about demand. And so demand is pretty weak in the UK. But actually, the supply side is pretty weak as well. And as you mentioned earlier, Joe has been hit by a number of successive supply shocks. And so we have growth that's, it's there, there's

11:31some, but it's pretty weak. And even though you have variations, we have monthly GDP data in the UK, which we don't have in the US. That was a real surprise to me. But there are, you know, variations in the monthly GDP data, but underlying GDP, which is what we tend to look at, and we build it based on a bunch of surveys. That's pretty weak, you know, point 2% growth per quarter. So that's not significant. That said, the supply side of the economy is also pretty weak. And so if you had more demand than that, that could actually end up becoming inflationary.

12:04Yeah, just intuitively, you know, you mentioned the supply side, and like much of the sort of developed Western world, there is the okay, there's the struggles of the industrial sector, in large part due to competition with China. There's the fact that if you're in a sector that's not AI, you're probably not getting a ton of investment. London is, London specifically, at least a decent AI hub. Okay, so we've established that the economy is somewhat weak, but you voted to hold rates. So what is it about the inflationary environment such that this weakness

12:40does not call for cuts right now? Yeah, so part of that story is the supply side, which is also incredibly weak. So if you had stronger growth, that could be inflationary. But I think it's worth thinking about where the UK economy was before the war in Iran, before we had this energy shock, because I think my and others views on where we are right now very much depends on where we started from. So before a few months ago in February, you know, we had inflation that was still above target. It was coming towards target, but was still above target. We've had inflation above target for the best part of five years now in the UK. So it's been

13:14above 2% for all but one or two months in the past five years. And that's off the back of a couple of successive shocks, particularly COVID and also the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And so as we were looking at inflation start to come down towards our 2% target, it had been coming down more slowly than we had hoped since I got here, in fact. And if you've looked at some of the forward looking indicators for wages and also for prices, those actually seem to be stalling out. So we run a

13:45survey called the Decision Makers Panel, the DMP, where we ask companies about their own price expectations a year ahead and their own wage growth expectations a year ahead. And their own price expectations a year ahead had pretty much stalled out. So they weren't really coming down anymore. Also, more worrisome, in my view, was what they thought about wages a year ahead, where they thought they were going to drop a little bit from last year. So not much, not as much as we had expected. Wage growth was going to drop. Wage growth was going to drop a little bit. That's right. Not wages, wage growth. And also,

14:16we have agents who are based around the country who go and talk to firms. They do a whole survey on pay settlements. And pay settlements were due to come in a bit lower this year. Pay settlement growth was due to come in a bit lower than it was last year. So this disinflationary process had signs of stalling out. Also, if you look at inflation expectations, so household inflation expectations were really elevated before Iran was invaded. In fact, up until February, they were above what you could explain looking at historical relationships between inflation outturns and

14:49inflation expectations. So it was a concern that households were thinking that inflation was going to be higher. That could feed through into wage setting, which could explain why wage growth was coming off more slowly than we'd expected. And therefore, price growth was coming off more slowly than we'd expected. So there were already some signs of some persistence from previous shocks left in the economy. In fact, I've been working on a speech on second round effects since before Iran was invaded. And part of me thought, gosh, is this going to be irrelevant?

15:20You know, in six months when I finally give this speech, of course, it's only more relevant now. But I was already worried about some of this inflation persistence and some of the second round effects from the last couple of negative supply shocks, even before Iran was invaded. And of course, since then, we've now had a negative supply shock, an energy shock, and that stands to push inflation up and growth down, which is a terrible situation for a central banker to be in. So just to emphasize this point is the idea that if we keep getting transitory shock after transitory

15:50shock, or if we keep getting I think you've used the word mini waves of inflationary bouts over and over and over again, expectations will be more vulnerable towards higher inflation levels. So people will be even more worried about inflation once we get like the third shock and the fourth shock. That's right. And the size of the shock matters too. So inflation was 11% a couple years ago, that was on the front page of every newspaper households kind of knew about it, they saw it at the grocery store. So we've done a lot of research showing that households and businesses are possibly

16:23just more attentive to inflation. And particularly once inflation comes within a certain band, so there's a threshold, it used to be no one paid attention to inflation if it was below 4%. That band has actually shifted down. So in the UK, we think that if inflation is somewhere between 3%, 3.5%, that's the threshold at which people actually notice it a lot more. So if you then have another negative supply shock and inflation go up, people will be much more sensitive to that. We also have done research showing that people are more sensitive to upside surprises in inflation than downside surprises

16:56in inflation. And so that's a concern given we're now facing rising inflation. And then for firms, when

Inflation Expectations

17:02they're looking at inflation, it used to be before we had these supply shocks that firms kind of set prices on a schedule. And since the pandemic, they've shifted much more to state dependent pricing. So when inflation gets higher, they set prices more often and pass through their higher costs through the end user in the form of higher prices. And that that's remained. So if that you have more state dependent pricing from firms, then actually you can get a pass through from inflation expectations for them much more quickly. Data centers need electricity, AI needs copper, reshoring needs steel, and gold's run may tell you

17:52something about how the world is repricing money and debt. All of those point back to real assets. The RACS ETF is an actively managed one-stop real asset shop from gold to commodities to natural resource equities, adjusting as conditions change. Visit vanec.com slash r-a-a-x pod to learn more. And investors should consider the investment objective, risks, charges, and expenses of the fund carefully before investing to obtain a prospectus and summary prospectus, which contain this and other information. Visit vanec.com. Please read the prospectus and summary prospectus

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20:04customer support that actually helps. Go to public.com slash market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash market. Ad paid for by Public Holdings. Brokered services by Public Investing. Member FINRA SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors. SEC Registered Advisor. Crypto services by ZeroHash. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. So with people clearly caring about higher inflation more than they care about deflation being more

20:35attuned to higher inflation and with companies more willing to reset prices in the face of higher inflation, to what degree does the BOE try to get ahead of higher inflation versus wait for it to actually emerge? Yeah. So the way that we think about these kinds of shocks propagating through the economy, it's sort of in three different phases. The first phase is kind of direct effects. So when you have an energy shock that automatically makes energy prices higher for everyone, in the UK, we actually have a price cap for households, the off-gen price cap. And so households have been

21:08shielded from that bit until July, and then they'll see energy costs go up. So this could happen in stages. But in any case, monetary policy doesn't kick in for 18 to 24 months. So it kicks in with a lag. So if we were to respond to that right now, by the time it hits the economy, it's just too late. And we could risk suppressing activity unnecessarily. So mostly you look through direct energy effects. Then you think about indirect energy effects. So firms that are using energy pass it on. For example,

21:39food production is a great example. It's pretty energy intensive, both through fertilizer, but also transport. And so you see food prices start to go up, which I think we probably will see. And so those are indirect effects. And the jury's out a little bit amongst the central banking community on whether you should try to lean against indirect effects or not. Generally, you should try to lean against some of them, but not all of them, again, because of lags in monetary policy. The real kicker is second round effects. And that's when actually all these price increases start changing wage and price setting

22:11behavior so that you get individuals and households saying, well, I can't, my money's just not going as far anymore. You're going to have to pay me more. And then firms might say, fine, we'll pay you more, but now our costs are higher. So we're going to pass that through in higher prices. And that can turn into a bit of a spiral. We've looked at past supply shocks in the UK, and every single one of them has had second round effects, but to very differing degrees, depending on the state of the economy at the time. So in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2022, you had second round effects in all of these

22:46situations. But the economy was very different in these different periods. We tend to look at 2022 because it's the most recent one. And I think for a lot of people, kind of the most scarring one when you had energy costs go up so much. And in 2022, of course, it's worth remembering we had just reopened after COVID. So you did have pretty strong demand. And also the labor market was pretty tight. That's not the case now. Actually, we have much weaker demand in the UK economy, and we have a much weaker labor market, and it's continuing to weaken. So we have slack in the labor market. So that suggests that

23:21we shouldn't get the same degree of second round effects now that we did in 2022. I think that's of little comfort, actually. Those were pretty extreme second round effects. I also look at 2011, when the labor market was actually much weaker than it is now. You had unemployment of 8% in the UK, and you had some second round effects then. So right now, the economy is somewhere in between those two. So we will get some second round effects. It's impossible to calibrate them exactly. In advance, the trick for us also is that, you know, we kind of know how to measure direct and indirect effects. We can do

23:56that pretty easily. The second round effects are pretty difficult to measure. But of course, if we wait until we have real concrete evidence of them, we're too late in responding. So we're going to have to make a judgment, a proactive judgment in advance about the size of the second round effects that we're going to want to lean against so that we can lean against them in time. You know, Kirsten, I have a theoretical question. I've been meaning to ask someone about this.

Theoretical Question

24:22When the inflation started to explode in the immediate wake of the pandemic, really globally, one of the stories that people like to tell was that monetary policy would have weaker teeth or be less effective in the U.S. in part because so many American households are on 30-year fixed mortgages, unlike in much of the other Western world or the Anglosphere world, where a lot of people's mortgages reset regularly. Did that actually play out in practice? Did BOE decisions transmit quicker

24:54to the real economy because fewer households see their mortgage bill reset on a regular basis? Yeah, so we've done a lot of looking into the monetary transmission mechanism to see how the change in the structure of the U.K. mortgage market has affected things. Because to your point, in the U.K., we weren't always all on two- and five-year fixed mortgages. In fact, you used to have longer-term fixes. You've had periods with variable mortgages. But today it's dominated by two- and five-year. Mostly it's two- and five-year with, I think, an increasing number of variable mortgages. And so what you

25:27find is that it does transmit a bit more quickly. But it's also very different in the U.S. In the U.K., you can port your mortgage with you, whereas in the U.S. you can't. So there's an entire supply problem in the U.S. that we don't face. We face supply problems in real estate in the U.K., but for completely different reasons. So that's a difference that's worth taking into account as well. But it's also meant, even though it's a shorter fix that we have here, it does mean that, you know, over the course of this hiking and cutting cycle, even though rates have been coming down for a while

25:58now, consumers haven't really been spending. And I think one of the reasons for that is that even though rates are coming down, as people come off a five-year fixed mortgage, their own debt servicing costs are jumping massively from where they were when they first took out the mortgage. And so even though rates are coming down, people's debt servicing costs continue to go up. And so as you're in a rate cutting cycle, you would expect consumers to spend a bit more. We're not finding that so much. So this is one potential explanation for why consumers aren't spending more. It could also be scarring from previous

26:30bouts of inflation as well. But that's going to feed into the current conjuncture, because one of the concerns, of course, I'm worried about inflation. I think that's paramount. And I think the risks to inflation are on the upside. But of course, you have to offset that with the risk of weaker demand. And if consumers aren't spending in the UK because they're scarred from previous experiences, then they're looking at this energy shock and probably thinking, well, no way I'm going to spend now. I'd better save for a rainy day, which, by the way, could be now. And so there is a chance that consumption and

27:02therefore growth could be even weaker than we've been expecting as well. So you have to offset that with concerns about greater inflation. Since we're talking about the consumer, I mean, it feels like one of the few potential deflationary forces out there, but still potentially a very big one is AI, right? And this idea that, well, if there are fewer jobs because of AI, then obviously people are going to be earning less and spending less. And that's going to exert deflationary pressure on many different economies. What have you seen so far in terms of the impact of AI on the job market? And

27:35how are you thinking about this, you know, kind of very new still development? Yeah. So the bank has done some research on how AI is affecting the labor market in particular. And there's some nascent evidence that maybe those industries that are more exposed to AI are seeing fewer job openings than industries that are less exposed, which you can imagine. Use unemployment is particularly high in the UK. So I think it's quite easy to jump to a conclusion that suggests that, you know, it's very difficult to get a job if you're just coming out of uni and maybe that's an AI

28:09effect. But I think there's actually very little evidence to directly make that link. And so there isn't much evidence of that. It's not just the labor market, of course, though, as I mentioned already, I'm worried about the supply side of the UK economy. So most of the supply shocks we've seen over the past couple of years have been negative supply shocks. AI represents the one potential positive supply shock that we might see coming down the pike. And so that could be possible. We look at the supply side of the economy all the time now at the Bank of England. When I first started, we only looked at it once a year because it's not supposed to move around that much. But

28:42we've learned actually... What does that mean once a year? Did you have like supply side week or something where you all got together and thought about it? I find this very interesting. Yeah, so it's not that we didn't ever talk about it in the intro, but we did like a real deep dive on the supply side of the economy to try to measure productivity growth, total factor productivity. I mean, really deep dive. And it really was a once a year event. And now we do it all the time, because obviously, the supply side moves more than we had expected, we keep getting hit by supply shocks. But you know, when we look at the supply side of the economy, there is no judgment that we've

29:14put in on the supply side to do with AI. So possibly, it's in our assumptions about productivity growth, just through some assumption about investment. But generally, we haven't made a judgment that over the next three years, AI will meaningfully impact productivity. And I'm not sure that that's right. I think the timing of this is the hardest part. Well, actually, when I think about the term supply side or supply side shocks, I think there are sort of two things, right? There's a supply side shock. You can't do anything. Suddenly, the price of electricity goes up everywhere. And we call that

29:47a supply side shock. And it's not great when that happens. And then there is also the sort of like core productive capacity of a country and how productive industries are and what type of investment is there and so forth. Even setting aside the shocks, the trend seems to be negative in the UK in terms of business investment. You hear about the last steel mill or whatever that's closing. Or I read something recently, the UK might be importing salt for the first time or whatever.

30:19In your whether it's formerly annual, but now regular studies of the supply side of the UK economy, do you have a diagnosis or do you have an assessment about what is driving this sort of long term deterioration? I mean, we do. And so far as you can say, there hasn't been a whole lot of investment in the UK, starting with the global financial crisis. I think most people pin that on Brexit and Brexit didn't really help, but it predates Brexit. And so that has been a long term drag on potential

30:49growth, productivity growth. We assume that productivity growth in particular will rebound to its long term trend. And I'm not sure that that's right. I think my own view is that the risk to that is entirely on the downside. But, you know, a lack of investment is part of it. And then on top of that, I mean, I understand how you're splitting these out. But if you keep getting negative supply shocks, then eventually that does feed through into potential growth. Yeah. And so I think that's a concern. And the way that central bankers have approached negative supply shocks has always been

31:22you just look through them. They're temporary. You know, you Bank of England can't do anything about the Strait of Hormuz, for example, can't actually address it. We have can't reverse Brexit. No, we have tools that are uniquely designed for demand side problems. They can't really address supply side problems. And so we've always learned to just look through them and consider sort of underlying inflation, underlying growth. And I think that when you keep having negative supply shocks and you consider that households and businesses are more attentive to inflation,

31:54that, you know, they're setting prices more often, that some kinds of inflation are more salient for households and businesses and other, particularly food and energy inflation. And we keep having increases in both of those things. Then that eventually gets embedded into people's expectations and then their wage and price setting. And so that creates the kind of inflation persistence that I've been worried about even before this invasion of Iran. But now I continue to be worried about it. Running a small business takes everything you've got, but with Chase for Business,

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33:12make more of what's yours. These may apply to Chase Business Complete Checking accounts. The $500 offer is available for new business checking accounts with qualifying activities through June 18th, 2026. Eligibility and qualification requirements must be met. Additional restrictions may apply. Please speak with a business banker for more information. JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA, member FDIC. Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds, and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with

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34:53you prepare for volatility. But in life, even the best strategies can't prevent every bad day. A fire, a loss, a disruption that demands immediate attention. When that happens, what matters isn't just what you planned, it's who shows up. That's where Cincinnati Insurance comes in. For more than 75 years, they've helped individuals and businesses navigate life's toughest moments with care, expertise, and personal attention. Together with independent agents, Cincinnati Insurance focuses on relationships, not transactions. Their approach is grounded in

35:26experience, follow-through, and trust built over time. Bad days happen, and when they do, you deserve an insurance partner who understands risk, respects what you've built, and is ready to help you move forward. The Cincinnati Insurance Companies. Let them make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at c-i-n-f-i-n dot com. I'm going to ask another sort of background American visiting London, haven't been here for many years kind of question. But when people talk about the UK's higher-

35:57You were here last year. Oh, yeah. I haven't lived here for many years. When people talk about the UK's high exposure to energy volatility, why is that? Because the other thing people talk about in relation to the UK is like it does actually have North Sea oil. It does have kind of its own supply. Like what exactly is that vulnerability in this economy? So it has some supply, not massive amounts. And I think part of the trick is it's also very exposed to gas prices, which, you know, were what went up so dramatically when Russia invaded Ukraine.

36:33And then in the UK, electricity prices are keyed off of gas prices. So then electricity is particularly vulnerable as well. So unfortunately, I mean, the US has kind of energy independence at the moment. The UK is nowhere close to that position. I know in the US, there is an entire art to asking a monetary policy setter a question about fiscal policy because you have to do it very delicately. Otherwise, they might faint over in their chair if they're presented with something outside their remit. I don't know what exactly the

37:06norms are here about how we're supposed to phrase such questions to elicit some sort of answer. But with all that out of the way, when you think about upward pressure on inflation and why you're so concerned about inflation, and we've talked about energy and all that, how much does the seeming inability of government after government to engage in fiscal consolidation, how much is that a factor when you think about the future trajectory of inflation?

37:36Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say what any rate setter will tell you. So thank you for that. Yeah, I've done all the throat clearing for you. Yeah. But I mean, the way that we think about fiscal policy is we take exactly what's legislated and we put that into our models. Okay. So we stipulate that it doesn't seem like there is any real impulse at fiscal consolidation or capacity right now. So what does that mean? Well, so, I mean, actually the government has legislated some consolidation given fiscal rules,

38:07and so that is exactly what we put into our forecast. And so that's just one of the conditioning assumptions is what's legislated, we assume will happen. And then we base our forecasts off the back of that. But so just to push further, some of these fiscal choices, like the inviolability of, say, the triple lock, which again, I'm not asking you whether these are good or bad policies, etc. But are these contributors to the persistence of upside inflation risks?

38:37So I think it contributes to government borrowing costs. So we're sitting in the UK a day after long-term rates went up. Some of that is to do with the Strait of Hormuz. Some of that is to do with true social posts. Sure. Some of that may be because there are local elections coming up. And I think there's just a whole bunch of positioning around that in a guilt market, which is pretty niche, and fairly small relative to the US Treasury market in particular. So I think that's all worth considering as well. And that all feeds through into financial conditions.

39:08You mentioned guilt yields. Now that you've gone from sort of finance Twitter to, you know, hardcore economic practitioner, monetary policy practitioner. She did have real jobs. I know. I know. But not like, not on a central bank. Come on. I'm complimenting the current role, not denigrating the previous ones. That's my intent. I'll always be economist Meg to you. That's right. That's right. Economist Meg. But like, how do you think about bond vigilantes? Do you have nightmares? Or have you gone from tweeting

39:41about bond vigilantes to thinking about them relentlessly as you watch UK guilt yields go up? No. So I neither have nightmares about them, nor do I wish I could tweet about them. I think markets are sometimes efficient, and sometimes get things totally wrong. And so we have an entire function at the bank that talks to investors to get a sense of kind of what's behind their positioning, what they think. Often, it's what do they think about us? What do they think we should be doing? What do they think we will do? And I think that's all worth understanding, because like

40:15I said, sometimes they get things right. Certainly not always. Well, let me ask you a mechanical question about the bond market, which is, are the coupon payments, as we see yields rise? And this is a question for all developing economies, and it certainly at least a little bit of an anxiety in the US as well. As we see those coupon payments rise, are we anywhere near where those interest payments themselves are creating an inflationary impulse in the UK, which economists would call fiscal dominance?

40:46Yeah. I mean, I mostly look at this through financial conditions. And so if you get bond yields rising, then that's tightening financial conditions, and that feeds through into the economy. And then there's a judgment to be made about what monetary policy should do about it. But that's a fiscal expenditure, that coupon payment. And so the question is, is it of a size such that that fiscal expenditure, which the screens tell us is rising when we see the rates rising, is that large enough? Or is there a delta there such that that actually itself creates an

41:18inflationary impulse? So no, that's not a significant impulse that we're looking at. Mostly, we're just looking at it through financial conditions. So we talked earlier about spillover from US monetary policy, and it is thinkable that the US could be raising rates sooner than it might be lowering rates. How would you anticipate the feed through from a tightening of US monetary conditions to the UK at this current moment? Yeah. So as I mentioned, there's significant read through from the US Treasury market into the UK

41:52guilt market, rightly or wrongly. So if you look at economic indicators that come out and how they influence our financial conditions in the UK, the indicator, if it surprises that it influences conditions here the most is UK inflation, thank goodness. Secondly, is US inflation. I think third might be nonfarm payrolls in the US. It's not at all clear why these things should actually be influencing financial conditions in the UK, right? But I think part of that is an implicit assumption that the

42:22Fed is the world's biggest economy central bank. And so when the Fed does something, everybody kind of has to. I don't think that's right, actually, but you can't ignore these spillovers. So if financial conditions were to tighten in the US, that would feed through to the UK and financial conditions. I mean, of course, the reason matters. But you know, if it's because of rate hikes, in the US, it could mean that our financial conditions tighten as well. And then that feeds through into kind of our view of how restrictive our monetary policy stance is, and how we manage

42:55inflation towards our 2% target. Can I go back to something you said at the very beginning when I asked you about what is the remit or the objective of the central bank? And you said one thing is to support the government. And that is not like formally, I don't think that's part of the Fed. But I know that that's like why the whole bank, that's why the Bank of England was founded was to be to the government's bank and to facilitate financing of the government. Does that functionally change anything? Does that mean something substantively different in terms of the conduct of monetary

43:27policy within the BOE versus say another central bank, when that's sort of like part of your founding charter? Yeah. So to be clear, our mandate really is 2% inflation sustainably in the medium term, subject to that, to support the goals of the government. And they've changed. And this is a mandate that the Treasury sets every November. So it's once a year, they look at it. And what fits in that has changed over the past couple of years on the margin. There was an incident a few years ago in which the bank and the government, the bank helped out the government a little bit.

44:00But that had nothing to do with the mandate. Yeah, for what it's worth. But so in my time at the Bank of England, we've only hit our inflation target for one or two months, maybe. And so while I've been at the Bank of England, and I think generally it's the case, really 2% inflation is the target. And we're working tirelessly to hit that. So the secondary part of the mandate, which is subject to that, we haven't we haven't achieved that yet. So that that is the primary focus. Can you talk a bit more about just the decision making process on the MPC? Because again, here,

44:34here, I'm going to emphasize Megan's many other jobs. You've been in academia, you've been in business settings. And now you're at a central bank. What are the sort of differences that you observe between how like the decision making making process works at those types of institutions versus a central bank? This is just a long way of me asking you what the discussions are actually like. Are they as vigorous as Prime Minister's questions, which is our only exposure to what policy making looks like in the UK? Yeah, so we meet every six weeks. And every other time we produce a forecast. So when you produce a

45:07forecast, it's a more involved process. This last round was particularly interesting, because we didn't produce a forecast. We said, you know what, things are so uncertain, we're just going to produce three scenarios. We're not going to give you weights on them. Who knows what's happening with energy prices. But we produce three different scenarios. And they were based on kind of what energy futures curves might look like, how energy prices might evolve, and then also second round effects off the back of that. And so as you can imagine, in the good old days, not good old days, in the old days,

45:39when we only produced a central forecast, that was a less involved process, I would say than now producing a bunch of scenarios to think about risk, and uncertainty. And now I think we're facing kind of 90 and uncertainty. So radical unpredictability and uncertainty. So it's an incredibly involved process to produce these scenarios to think about different states of the world, to try to identify where we might be in these scenarios. And then most importantly, to try to figure out how we would respond if we were in any parts of these worlds. And so to figure out our reaction function, we look at

46:15you, we look at the market curve, but we also look at a whole bunch of policy rules. They're all different. And in figuring out where we forecast from, we have to figure out where we are, we've used a whole bunch of different models, get loads of updates and research notes from our fantastic staff to help inform us of where we're starting from, because that's always really important. So you know, in a forecast round, it's about three weeks of intensive discussions and research and notes, and then figuring out how to communicate that to the outside world, I think is really important too.

46:49So it is a really involved process. And I would say that the model where we have externals and internals, and where dissent is totally normal does work in that we certainly don't agree on everything. In fact, often we don't agree on important things. And that comes out in our votes. But I think that's how you make sure that you're making the strongest decisions.

Conclusion

47:11This might be sort of like an abstract question. You can take it however you want it. A prior guest we've had on the podcast a bunch of times, Hyun Song Shin, recently became the head of Korea Central Bank. And I read his opening speech, which I thought was really interesting. And he said, you know, central bankers like to talk about theory and putting it into practice. And you have theories like independence is good and so forth, these ideas you put in practice. He said, in reality, the practice happens. So then you sort of form a theory around it. And that we're in a moment of historical change for central banks, for many reasons, perhaps political, the right populism,

47:45politics is changing, that might change the nature of central banks, AI, the extreme uncertainty of AI and how that's going to affect the economy. That's a source of change. And therefore central banks period are going to be in a new period of like the old ways. Does it feel like whether at the BOE or general that we're going to be entering a new era of central banking per se? Yeah, I think we already have in fairness. So I've spoken to some of my predecessors, Kristen Forbes, I saw recently, for example, and she said, you're so lucky my entire time on the MPC,

48:18I never voted to change interest rates at all. Oh, my God. That's right. And now I've seen... It's like inconceivable now. That's right. And so I've seen a hiking cycle, a holding cycle and a cutting cycle. And who knows what comes next off the back of this shock. And so I do think that that has changed. But also, you know, I think getting hit by successive shocks is just here to stay. And I think you can identify some already. So if economic statecraft is how major world powers are going to operate using economic tools for foreign policy goals, those just represent negative supply shocks

48:53for someone. And so, you know, I think we will continue to have negative supply shocks, whether it's tariffs or export controls or investment controls, all of these things. And then climate change, whether it's physical risk or transition risk, if it crystallizes, that represents a negative supply shock as well. So we're no longer at a point where we can kind of say, well, one day we might have some of these things happen. I think we're already there. And so this old adage that you should just look through negative supply shocks because you can't address them directly. I don't think it works when

49:24you keep having them wave after wave. And I also think there's just a ton of uncertainty now. A lot of economists feel like they had a framework for understanding how the global economy worked. And it doesn't work anymore, but no one's quite identified the new one. And so in an age when you have this much uncertainty, you need to stop thinking about your very specific forecast where you do get out whether inflation's 0.2 percentage points higher or lower in year three of your forecast. It's kind of neither here nor there. It's much more about kind of scenario analysis

49:58and risk management when you're making decisions about interest rates. So figuring out if we thought we were in this state of the world and it turns out we're in a different one, how bad could we mess that up? And how do we minimize some of those costs? And that's a different way of thinking, I think, about central banking than what we had in the past. I mean, other than scenario analysis, is there anything else that central bankers should do in order to deal with supply shocks? Because this was a theme post-COVID in the U.S., this idea that the Fed only has an interest rate. An interest rate

50:30is not a particularly adept tool at dealing with the supply side. As you said earlier, central bankers are often, you know, they're very much trained and focused on dealing with the demand side, not necessarily the supply side of the equation. And part of that is because they don't necessarily have the right tools. Yeah. We don't really have the right tools. So we've got what we've got. Could you get tools is what I'm asking. Yeah, it's a good question. I think probably if you're making decisions about the supply side of the economy, often that comes down to questions about choosing

51:02winners and losers. And that's not what independent central banks are here for. That's what elected politicians are there for. So I think some of these solutions have to come from elected officials and not from central banks at all. But understanding that it's the multiplicative effects of multiple supply shocks rather than just looking at them in concert is important. And also, you know, we we look at decompositions of inflation over the past and you can't explain them all using standard channels. There's just kind of a wedge. And sometimes that's a judgment that we've made.

51:33And sometimes it's just an unknown. But being a bit more curious about these wedges, why haven't things panned out in a way that we can perfectly explain? Maybe there's something else going on because of these supply shocks. I think there's a lot of work to be done in that area, too. You also mentioned communicating how the central bank, how the BOE is thinking to the market and I guess to households as well. We might have a new Fed governor very, very soon in the form of Kevin Warsh. And he is, as far as I can tell, not a fan of forward guidance. I think that's fair to say.

52:08Someone pedantic is going to point out that the Fed may already have abandoned forward guidance of the bond market based off of what happened in 2022. But if we got a more formalized abandonment of forward guidance, does that make your job at the BOE a lot more difficult if you're trying to judge the spillover effects from U.S. bonds? So I think we don't understand the spillovers just from what the Fed is saying about them. We're also looking at the U.S. economy and the fundamentals. So forward guidance has its place, I think. You don't

52:41need it all the time. I don't think that means we won't understand what's happening in the U.S. economy and therefore how that might spill over into the U.K. economy. I think there are just different approaches on this stuff. So if I look over the whole of this conversation, you're talking a lot about being wary of inflationary risks. And we talked about maybe the public and companies being more primed towards inflationary risks than they were previously. Why did you vote to hold rates last week? Why didn't you? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think given that

53:13it will take too long to get evidence for second round effects to actually address them, I think that's a fair question. You know, if you don't hike now, then when are you going to? To my mind, a big contribution was that we are going to get some news over the next six weeks or so, but, you know, over the next couple of months. And a lot of that news will not be definitive evidence of second round effects, but it will be evidence about energy prices, which are a big feed into what's going on with the economy and with inflation. So is there a state of the world in which restrictiveness that

53:47we already have in our monetary policy stance, because we are restrictive, I think, just not hugely so, but is there a state of the world in which actually if the war ended tomorrow, the Strait of Hormuz opened up completely, whether that restrictiveness could squeeze out the second round effects that have already been kicked off by this crisis? I think it's defensible to think that possibly there are. In my view, the risk is entirely on the upside, though. There's kind of a ratchet here. I think the risk to energy prices and also second round effects are probably on the

54:17upside rather than the downside. But I do think that it's worth waiting for a little while to see kind of what happens with the progression of this war and therefore see what we can infer about how it will propagate through the economy before we make a move. Megan, it was so great to catch up with you. So congrats on the new role. I know we're a little bit late to it, but it was really great to be able to actually ask you all the questions about what you're doing right now. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to see you. Yeah, thank you so much. That was great.

54:58Joe, that was really fun. It was great. I have to say I'm a little bit jealous that Megan probably has like a really nice office at the Bank of England building. I know the Bank of England, Bank of England. I know that would be a pretty sweet job. I think I'm going to go through like my entire career without ever having my own office in a building. I know me too. This I'd like I love my job and I'm going to leave it at that. It would be nice to one day just like have an office with a door and all that stuff. But but there are a bunch of interesting things to pick out of that

55:31conversation. I mean, I thought her point about the emphasis of central banks and economics in general on the demand side historically versus the supply side kind of captures a lot of the struggle that policymakers have had with the post covid economy. Right. Like all of economics is very much focused on the idea of like, well, you need a healthy consumer who's spending. Right. And going out and buying stuff versus like thinking about those supply side shocks. I think she made a really good point,

56:01which is it does seem at least theoretically possible to truly have one supply shock after another. And they really are just independent supply shocks. Right. At least it's conceivably possible. A pandemic is not the same thing as a war here, as a war there and so forth. They could be discreet events. The sort of money line for me when she said was the rise of economic statecraft. And if once governments start using economic tools as foreign policy and and once that cycle gets going,

56:36then there begin to be reasons to think that these discrete one off supply shocks are not just going to be things that are one and done, but that are part of a sustained new part of the world that consistent. And you see this obviously, I mean, the tariffs are one part of it, but all of the moves that we talked to about reassuring and strategic domestic investments for backup capacity, et cetera, this is like what constitutes a sustained trend. And so I thought it was really just overall very interesting to hear someone like really wrestle with the reality of conducting monetary policy

57:11in a period of sustained supply side degradation shocks, what have you. And then the question, of course, is if the central bank is not the right entity to deal with these supply side shocks, like should it, given its existing tools, which we touched on, like should it have new tools? I mean, a lot of people would say no because that's veering into fiscal and you want governments to decide that and democratically elected governments to decide that. But on the

57:43other hand, like if it keeps happening, it also feels somehow unsatisfactory to just say like, well, we're going to have to deal with this with like the existing toolkit. Yeah. And also, again, but it really does cut straight to the core of like what we want in a democratic society. You could say, you know what? Part of the reason we have declining productivity is because regulations on setting up a new factory are burdensome. Do we want non-elected officials deciding, oh, you know what? We're going to change environmental regulations. We're going to change

58:15the minimum wage. We're going to change the protected habitat speed. Like most people would be very uncomfortable with the, we're going to change household zoning so that there could be more construction in London. Most people would get really uncomfortable about what it would mean for the central bank to have the capacity to address supply side problems. But I think the other point is like maybe there are more creative ways of doing it that we haven't even thought of yet. So for instance, like could you do monetary policy on a weekly basis versus like a monthly decision? No, seriously. If like,

58:49if the entire world is changing on a week to week basis, maybe you need to start like making these decisions and like, yeah, I don't know. My point is like there may be creative solutions out there that we haven't even thought about. Oh, well, let's, let's get on that. Let's get up working on that. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen, Armand Daschle Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

59:24And for more Odd Thoughts content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Thoughts. We have a daily newsletter on all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24 seven in our discord, discord.gg slash odd lots. And if you enjoy odd lots, if you like it, when we talk to central bankers, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

59:59if you follow markets, you know, the value of long-term thinking. You plan, you diversify, you prepare for volatility. But in life, even the best strategies

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