Covid and the composition of spending
Speech given by
Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor, Monetary Policy
Bank of England webinar
12 January 2021
I've received helpful comments from colleagues at the I'd like to thank
Bank of England.
Cristiano Cantore, Rupert de Vincent-Humphreys, Pavandeep Dhami, Federico Di Pace,
Riccardo Masolo, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Mette Nielsen and Carleton Webb for their help in
preparing the speech. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the
Bank of England or other members of the Financial Policy Committee or the Monetary Policy
Committee.
1
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
Introduction
Good morning. Thank you for making the time to attend this talk.
It is dispiriting to have to give it as we enter another national lockdown. But the mass vaccination
programme now underway also provides genuine hope that this latest set of measures may be the last. And
in the meantime, as far as the economic effects of the pandemic are concerned, we should take the
opportunity to learn from what happened in 2020. In this respect I want to focus today on one particular
aspect of the experience last year, namely the huge shifts in the pattern of consumer spending.
Chart 1 is one place to start. It plots annual growth in GDP, from one fourth quarter to the next, against the
same for retail sales1. As you all know, the first lockdown led to an enormous drop in economic activity, of
over 20%, during the first half of 2020. And despite a very sharp recovery in the summer, as the first
lockdown was lifted, it's likely that GDP in the fourth quarter of last year was around 10% lower than at the
end of 2019. That would make it the sharpest decline, through any calendar year, at least since 1920 (as far
back as quarterly estimates go).
Yet, perhaps befitting a year of extraordinary events, last year's downturn was very unusual not just in its
size and speed, but in its shape as well. If you had only this correlation to go by, and knew what had
you'd also expect to have seen a steep decline in retail sales.
happened to GDP, The two series don't
always move in lockstep but, as you can see, they've been reasonably If that's
well correlated over the past.
been a rule, however, then what we saw in 2020 was a very clear exception to it: GDP growth may have
been the weakest on record but retail spending growth is just about the strongest.
Chart 1: Weak GDP growth, strong retail sales Chart 2: Big divergence across consumption
Sources: ONS and Bank calculations.
Sources: ONS and Bank calculations.
The retail sales data have been adjusted for the switch to CPI
Retail sales data have been adjusted for the switch to CPI
deflation in 2001. Retail sales growth for 2020 Q4 is based on
deflation in 2001. The figure for 2020Q4 is based on data to
data to November, services growth on data available to date.
November, GDP growth on the MPC's November projection.
1
The series is retail sales excluding fuel, which goes back slightly further (to 1988) than the aggregate figure.
2
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
There are probably several reasons for this anomaly, and in the first part of this talk I'll briefly go through
some of them. Perhaps the single most important factor is the introduction of the various furlough schemes.
At the cost of a huge jump in government debt these have shielded household income from the drop in
Spending by today's consumers has in part
national income seen in the first half of last year. been sustained
and funded by tomorrow's taxpayers.
However, what I want to spend more time on in this talk is something else: the significant shifts across
- they've grown by more
different areas of that spending. Retail sales may have been strong than the
-
historical average and more than household income but, as you can see from Chart 2, spending on
consumer services has been extremely weak.
There's an obvious reason for this, of course:
in the midst of the pandemic some activities involve more risk
of infection than others. Going to a busy shop may be more risky than shopping online. Sadly, eating in a
restaurant, going to a football game and attending a concert are riskier still. Whether because of people's
own natural caution, or the official lockdowns, spending on anything that involves physical proximity to other
people has had to be cut significantly.
But cutting back on these activities doesn't necessarily mean a similar decline in total consumption. At least
-
in principle, people could compensate for cuts in some areas by spending more in others switching from
physical to online retail, for example, or from restaurants to take-away food. And my aim today is to try and
understand a bit about the extent of these shifts in consumer demand and their consequences for the supply
side of the economy.
As far as the demand side is concerned, a relevant question is this: faced with a rise in infection risk, and a
necessary curtailment in the activities that expose people to it, will people choose to spend all the money
they would've done, simply transferring it to other, less risky things? Or would you expect them instead to
reduce their total spending and save a little more, essentially deferring consumption to the future?
help think about this question I'll
To use the simplest and most stylised model of consumer behaviour
imaginable. It focuses only on the direct effects of the pandemic on consumption and saving and ignores
everything else. Obviously this isn't realistic.
For example, we know that saving rates tend to rise when
income. It's clear that the crisis could
people become more pessimistic or more uncertain about their future
have indirect effects of this sort.
But I think it's helpful to separate the differing
roles of economic and pandemic risk on demand. And as far
as the latter is concerned, it turns out that two things matter for this choice (i.e. whether to switch to other
things the money people would've been spending on risky activities or instead to
save it). One is how similar
the two sorts of consumption are. If you don't lose much by substituting one for the other then, in the face of
3
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
a jump in infection rates, you're likely to do more of
it. The compensating rise in non-risky spending would
be bigger and the decline in total spending smaller.
The other factor is the expected duration of the jump. At least as predicted by this simple model, the degree
of expenditure switching is greater, and the drop in aggregate spending smaller, the longer the rise in
infection rates is expected to persist. It's when the opposite is true - when people expect pandemic risk to
- that they're more inclined to wait, and
dissipate and conditions for spending to improve relatively soon
defer some spending (even in aggregate) until that happens. So at least as far as its direct impact is
concerned, we might expect the pandemic to have material effects on aggregate consumption only if those
effects are also temporary. Simple theory suggests there should be an inverse relationship between the
depth of the downturn and its duration. Seen this way, the severity of the drop in consumption last spring
was in some ways the counterpart to its brevity.
The second thing I want to touch on today is what such expenditure-switching does to the supply side and
The answer for relatively moderate shifts is probably "not much".
average costs in the economy. The
composition of what we buy changes all the time, as do relative prices, and we can usually safely ignore this
when thinking about the economy as a whole. Nor should such shifts in the composition of spending matter
much in the longer term, even if they're sizeable. That's because, over time, economic resources - people,
-
capital and general know-how can move in response. The economy adapts.
But for a short time, at least, significant shifts in demand may be harder to absorb. They result in excess
capacity in some areas and too little in others. Until they're able to respond to the shift, resources are
As I'll explain later on, this can have negative effects on productivity, and positive
therefore misallocated.
effects on average costs, even for a given level of aggregate demand. The consequences for cost pressures
- -
over the medium term and therefore for monetary policy are probably limited. But this divergence in
demand may help to explain why, at least on impact, the pandemic has depressed inflation by a bit less than
we and others anticipated when it began.
Various things have contributed to gap between real GDP and retail spending
Expenditure switching certainly isn't the only reason for the contrast in Chart 1.
I want first to run through a
number of other things that have probably contributed to it.
One is the weakness of spending - on durables in particular - during the lockdown in the spring. At that time
there were many things people were simply unable to buy. For durable stuff, much of that spending is likely
to have been delayed rather than cancelled. If you needed a new fridge or a new car in March, you
One would've expected most
presumably still needed one in June, when the lockdown began to be eased.
of that catch-up to occur during the summer but some of it may also have leaked into the autumn and early
winter.
4
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
Second, part of the drop in GDP reflects an unusually large decline in the measured real output of public
services, something that has no consequences for people's incomes or their ability to spend. To construct
these estimates the Office for National Statistics uses detailed information on things like the numbers of
pupils in school and operations in hospitals. Normally these things carry on uninterrupted during recessions:
output of public services is in general less volatile than private-sector output (Chart 3). But on this occasion,
sweeping all before it, the pandemic curtailed many of these more standard activities, even after the full
-
lockdown was ended in the summer. In the third quarter of this year, for example, real healthcare output
-
as estimated by the ONS was still more than 20% lower than in 2019Q3. Taken together, measured
declines in measured health and education output accounted for a quarter of the near-9% drop in aggregate
GDP during the course of that year.
Note that there's been no decline in
nominal spending on public services, or the collective incomes of people
It's
who work in them. Employment in public services has continued to rise and so have average wages.
just that, at least as measured in the national accounts, productivity in that sector has declined and the
- "deflator" -
implicit price of those services the so-called has risen. The result is an additional wedge,
relative to any normal downturn, between (measured) real GDP and household incomes.
Chart 3: Drop in GDP partly reflects a steep fall Chart 4: Households protected from fall in
in measured output of public services. This has national income
no impact on household incomes
Sources: ONS and Bank calculations.
Sources: ONS and Bank calculations.
- -
The third and almost certainly the most important factor is the range of furlough schemes put in place this
year. These have introduced an even bigger wedge between GDP and household incomes, shielding
consumers from the huge drop in national income. This has been done only at the expense of a material rise
in public-sector debt, something that will have to be paid for over time. But as far as households are
concerned, the schemes have succeeded in smoothing out that cost, helping to sustain both incomes and
consumer spending in the meantime.
5
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
-
Let me now turn to another important contributor to the anomaly in Chart 1, and the main focus today the
extent to which consumers have responded to the pandemic by substituting some forms of spending for
I'll begin with what some simple economics has to say about what you might expect to happen,
others.
depending on the circumstances, and then look at a bit of evidence.
The direct impact of the pandemic on aggregate consumption
Let's suppose -
Imagine the government suddenly slaps a big excise duty on something people buy. just for
- it's
the sake of (wholly unrealistic) argument restaurant meals. Imagine too, just to make the parallel a little
closer, that the government compensates you for the cost of this (it redistributes the proceeds of the tax). So
you don't lose out in terms of income.
However, going out to eat still costs far more than it did, relative to
So you'll probably be inclined to go less often.
other stuff.
But what do you do with the money you would've spent? Do you simply switch it to other things, leaving your
aggregate consumption unchanged? Or do you reduce your total spending as well, and instead save a little
more?
At least for the idealised consumer of simple economic theory, two things turn out to matter for this decision.
One is the extent to which there are other, close substitutes for the taxed activity. If you liked cooking at
home, or indeed anything else, almost as much as going to a restaurant you'd be
more inclined to switch
Your total consumption wouldn't change much.
your spending immediately to these other things. In general,
a hike in a particular sales tax will have smaller effects on aggregate spending, and result instead in more
levied on something for which there are similar
expenditure-switching, if it's (and untaxed) alternatives.
The other important factor is how long you expect the policy to last. If he thinks the tax hike is permanent,
our idealised consumer of economic theory would substitute his spending straightaway towards other goods
close -
or services, regardless of whether they're substitutes. If not if he expects the government to come to
- he'll be
its senses at some point, and reverse the policy more inclined to wait until that happens. Sensing
his options will improve in future, and rather than switching spending to some other, imperfect substitute
today, he'll instead want to shift it to tomorrow. Spending on these other things would probably still go up,
but by less than the decline in the taxed activity. Aggregate consumption would therefore decline.
The way to understand this is to recognise that the amount you save involves a decision about how to
allocate your spending over time. And for that decision to change, the future has to look different in some
Unless it affects your income, a permanent change in relative prices won't do much to
way from the present.
overall spending. Temporary changes, which shift the relative attractiveness of spending at different points
in time, can have much more powerful effects.
6
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
The cut in VAT in late 2008, for example, enacted at the height of the financial crisis, was by design in place
for only a year. It improved households' real incomes and therefore their capacity to spend. But the more
If you know something's going to cost more in
important thing was that it was an explicitly temporary policy.
future there's an added incentive to buy it now.
The same is true of the various policies designed to boost
the "Eat Out to Help Out" scheme
spending in 2020: the VAT cut for the hospitality sector, and the reduction
in Stamp Duty. It's doubtful any of these would have had the same impact had they been seen as
permanent changes.
I've gone through this because I think there's a clear parallel
with the pandemic and its effects on consumer
demand. A jump in the prevalence of the illness acts like a big rise in the cost of particular things, activities
The cost isn't a monetary one (which is why a better analogy is a
that expose you to the risk of infection.
compensated tax hike). But it very clearly deters spending on riskier activities. By the same token, it also
increases the incentives either to switch spending immediately to other, less risky things, or to defer it to the
future (i.e. to cut aggregate consumption and save more).
And the factors that determine the balance of these responses are the same as for the hypothetical tax hike.
If either there are close substitutes for the riskier activities, or if you expect the jump in infection rates to
persist for an extremely long time, there will in theory be more limited effects on aggregate spending and a
Employing the economists' jargon,
greater degree of switching across categories2. substitution from the
risky activities will be more than
"intra-temporal" "inter-temporal". If, on the other hand, people expect the
-
rise in infection rates (and the associated restrictions) to subside relatively quickly and if there are also no
close substitutes for the sorts of spending that expose people to infection risk - one would expect a more
marked effect on aggregate consumption, and less expenditure switching.
based on is extremely
Charts 5(a)-(c) depict some simulations to get these points across. The model they're
simple and stylised. In particular, it assumes that incomes, current and expected, are held fixed, and that
there's no change in the degree of uncertainty about the economic outlook.
The only thing that changes is
the path, actual and expected, of the pandemic.
This is very obviously unrealistic. Household incomes have clearly been affected by the crisis. And we know
from long experience that when uncertainty about people's future incomes goes up, saving rates tend to rise
as well.
But as we saw earlier, from Chart 4, household incomes have been significantly protected by the furlough
(While this isn't a free lunch -
schemes, at least as compared with the huge dip in national income. higher
-
government debt has to be paid for eventually it does spread out the cost of that dip.) So the assumption
2
In a more general model than the one used here Krueger et al (2020) also point out that the impact of the pandemic on aggregate
spending is lower the closer the degree of substitutability between risky and non-risky consumption. Charalampidis and Guillochon
(2020) and Guerrieri et al (2020) also consider Covid in multi-sector models. See Cantore et al (2020) for a brief introduction to the
epimacro literature.
7
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
It's in any case
that incomes have been relatively stable may not be as unrealistic as it might have been.
useful, I think, to try to separate the direct effects of the pandemic on spending from its second-round impact,
via incomes and economic risk.
It's these direct effects that these simulations
Chart 5a: Two stylised paths for the pandemic, one
attempt to represent. Chart 5(a) plots two
more persistent than the other
stylised paths for infection risk, one of which lasts
a lot longer than the other (blue versus red). Our
hypothetical consumer understands these
dynamics and reacts accordingly in Chart 5(b).
Consumption of the risky good, which at the start
is assumed to account for around a quarter of the
total, follows (inversely) the path of the infection.
Spending on non-risky things moves in the
- there's a degree of
opposite direction
- but it's
expenditure switching in both cases
more significant, and the initial and corresponding fall in aggregate spending less marked, in the blue case,
when the virus is expected to persist for longer. Thus the response of consumer spending in aggregate is
either drawn out but relatively limited (blue) or sizeable but shorter-lived (red). Note that, in both cases,
aggregate consumption is slightly higher once the infection risk has gone because, having been saving
more, the consumer has greater net wealth by that point.
Chart 5b: Sharper response when infection rates Chart 5c: Response smaller when there are
less persistent close substitutes for risky spending
Finally, Chart 5(c) demonstrates what happens to aggregate spending when the two categories of spending
are assumed to be closer substitutes3. Both lines use the shorter-lived spike in infection rates (the red line in
3
The degree of substitutability between two goods corresponds to the sensitivity of their relative demand to a change in their relative
price (i.e. the slope of the demand curve). Chart 5(b) and the red line in Chart 5(c) assume that, in normal circumstances, a 1% rise in
its relative price would reduce demand for the risky good by 11⁄2%. The grey line in Chart 5(c) doubles this assumed response to -3%.
8
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
5(a)). When it's easier to find a reasonable substitute for the risky spending then, unsurprisingly, that's what
the consumer does. The drop in aggregate spending is also smaller in this case.
It's hard to test them definitively, with
How do these points square against the real-world experience? less
than a year's It's also quite possible that some of these parameters have changed
experience to go on.
through time. During the first lockdown, for example, there may have been a greater share of consumption
that was effectively considered "risky" than in the more recent
episodes4. Consumers may also have learned
over time how to adapt to these restrictions a little more. But I think there are still a few things in the
empirical data that are worth picking out.
First, I think there clearly was a fair amount of expenditure switching through this year. A pound less spent
on risky activities like going to restaurants or concerts has not meant a pound less in aggregate. This is
most obvious in cases where there are relatively close substitutes for the things people have been unable to
do. For example, the surge in retail spending we saw at the start of this talk has occurred despite a big drop
in sales at physical shops. That has been more than made up for by a big rise in online purchases (Chart 6).
Similarly, the inability to go out in people's free
time has probably contributed to a strong rise in spending on
audio-visual equipment, as they instead try to improve their leisure time at home. More generally, and as we
saw at the start, goods spending has been much stronger than spending on services - and also stronger
than the average rate of growth over the past and that of household income.
Chart 6: Online sales jumped during lockdown Chart 7: Saving rose and fell sharply during and
after the spring lockdown
The share of online retail sales. Source: ONS.
Sources: Bank of England, ONS, The Investment Association,
and Bank calculations. The blue line includes flows into
household deposits with banks, National Savings and Investment
4
I'm not going to distinguish here between consumers' own inclinations and any additional impact of mandated
lockdowns. That the
have an incentive to avoid infection themselves individuals won't
lockdowns have been necessary is clear. While they obviously always
take fully into account the risk they pose to others, particularly when so many people can apparently be infectious but free of symptoms.
In economists' language there's a clear "externality" that obligatory lockdowns are seeking to address.
For the same reason, it seems
very likely that the lockdowns will have had an additional effect on spending, above and beyond those that would've resulted from
consumers' own natural caution (although as my colleague Jan Vlieghe recently explained (Vlieghe (2020)), it's empirically difficult to
separate these things in the data because, in most countries, they've
coincided with each other, both of them responding to swings in
-
infection rates). In the current context you can think of this as a widening in the basket of activities that carry infection risk and
perhaps, more fundamentally, as the result of a model in which individual utility is replaced by some measure of social wellbeing.
9
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
accounts (NS&I), and retail funds.
Second, however, there are many affected areas of consumption for which there are no perfect (or even very
good) substitutes. And as far as the dynamics are concerned, movements in infection rates have been
- we're
extremely rapid in Chart 5(b) definitely in the red corner rather than the blue. This may have
contributed to the drop in aggregate spending we saw in the second quarter of last year. If you anticipate
that the worst will soon be over, and that the conditions for consumption will soon improve, you're
much
more likely to delay some of it. Switching there may have been, but aggregate spending still declined and
the saving rate still jumped (Chart 7).
Third, and equally, the rapid dynamics are evident in both directions. Total consumption fell sharply in the
-
spring, spending on risky activities even more so. But they both came back pretty smartly in the summer
-
much faster than in any normal cyclical upswing as infection rates declined and lockdown was lifted. The
jump in the saving rate in the second quarter was easily the largest rise on record in the (near) 60-year
On average, in the UK data, the
quarterly series. The drop in Q3 was also the largest fall on record. "half-
life" of deviations in the - -
saving rate the time it takes to retrace half of any change is over a year. On this
occasion it happened in a matter of weeks.
The idea that consumer spending would come back quite quickly once infection rates had begun significantly
- -
to decline faster, in particular, than in the "average" economic recovery was something built in to the
MPC's "scenario" last
May, early on in the pandemic. At the time, there was quite a bit of scepticism about
this and many judged it to be too optimistic. For my part I think there was every reason to expect a relatively
-
sharp recovery slower, perhaps than the precipitous drop but nonetheless faster than in a typical economic
than we'd
upswing. In the event spending came back even faster during the summer expected in May. The
same was true in other countries. And the interesting thing about these simple simulations (to the extent one
attaches any credence to them) is that they suggest that the initial downturn in aggregate spending may
have been as sharp as it was precisely because it was likely to be short-lived.
One of the reasons "normal" recoveries in
The role of the furlough schemes was obviously critical here.
consumption are more protracted is because drops in output feed through to household incomes, via hits to
employment and wage growth. This feedback slows down the dynamics of the average cycle. The schemes
helped to interrupt that loop.
By the same token, none of this means that, over the medium term, economic risk won't continue to affect
consumers' appetite for spending, as it's always tended to in the
past. If rates of unemployment were to
remain relatively high even two or three years from now, it's likely the saving rate will also be above average.
But I do think it's these more conventional factors - economic risk rather than pandemic risk - that we should
have in mind when thinking about what might happen to saving and consumption over the medium term.
10
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
Indeed I think this would be true even without taking into account the likely improvements in health
treatments (the new vaccines, for example).
The consequences for supply and costs
A market economy is a dynamic place. Adapting to economic conditions, meeting changes in consumer
- this is what it's
tastes and adopting new production methods meant to do. And underneath the macro-
economic surface, there is always a significant degree of churn of this sort. Even in normal times jobs are
destroyed and created all the time, buildings re-purposed and new techniques learned.
Most of the time, as macro-economists, we can safely ignore these things (we certainly tend to). We assume
-
that aggregate quantities are determined only by other aggregates potential output depends only on total
capital and labour, for example, and inflation only on some whole-economy version of spare capacity.
As long as economic resources are mobile this is
Chart 8a: In the short run there are diminishing
probably a reasonable thing to do. When thinking
returns to scale
about what determines supply capacity at the level of
an individual sector we generally think the process
"constant returns to scale".
exhibits what are called If
you double all the resources involved you double
potential output. So in Chart 8a the response of
output to demand looks like a straight line. And the
nice thing about this is that, if we add up demand
across a lot of sectors it doesn't matter what the
distribution of that demand looks like. Demand in
individual sectors can move anywhere along that
straight line and all that will matter for total output is
the total amount of spending5.
But economic resources aren't perfectly mobile, not in the short run at least. Even if people can move
relatively quickly from one job to another, it takes time to repurpose a building and to retrain an employee.
And when some of those capital resources are slow to move supply looks more like the curved line in Chart
there are "diminishing returns to scale".
8a: This implies that shifts in demand can, even for a given
aggregate, lower aggregate supply.
Chart 8b is meant to get this across. Suppose two sectors start with the same level of demand D and that
they each have the right level of resources. Then demand shifts from one to the other (to DL and DH
5
Samuelson and Swamy (1974).
11
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
- we're on the straight line -
respectively). When everything can move in response, capital as well as labour
aggregate output is unchanged. But when we're on the curved line, and averaging across the two sectors,
total attainable output is lower. At least until capital is able to react, and move from the low-demand to the
high-demand sector, resources are misallocated.
The counterpart for costs is shown in Chart 8c. With diminishing returns marginal costs increase along with
-
output the curved line gets steeper as you move to the right. So the rise in costs for a high-demand sector
is bigger than the drop for a low demand sector. At least in the short run, therefore, big shifts in demand can
raise costs across the economy as a whole, even for a given aggregate.
Chart 8b: Potential output could be affected by Chart 8c: Dispersion in demand can raise short-
large and rapid rise in the dispersion of demand run average costs
I shouldn't They don't negate the point that shortfalls in
exaggerate these effects. aggregate demand tend to
drag on costs and inflation. In reality, in fact, the shift could itself create such a shortfall. Capital may be
the labour market doesn't clear immediately
slower to move but even and some of those losing their jobs in
the low-demand sector would probably spend some time being unemployed before finding new jobs in the
high-demand sector.
Note too that the demand shifts would have to be quite big to have any material or noticeable effect.
Because the curved and straight lines have the same slope to start with, small shifts don't do that much to
average costs in the economy6,7. Indeed, in the real world, recognising that demand can move around
so they're able to meet
unpredictably, firms generally operate with a margin of spare capacity, precisely any
sudden rise in orders without incurring undue extra costs. This serves to flatten out the cost curve a bit.
6
Students of economics will recognise this as an example of something called the "envelope theorem". Around an optimum - in this
-
case an optimal amount of capital changes in the environment have only second-order effects on decisions.
7
Clearly the effects could be higher if the economy isn't
starting from an allocative optimum to begin with. There is quite a bit of work in
the economics literature exploring the effect of allocative inefficiencies on aggregate productivity, even in standard business cycles.
See, for example, Davis and Haltiwanger (1998), Chari et al. (2007) and Osotimehin (2019).
12
All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice
But on occasion sizeable shifts do happen. And at least until resources can mov