The week ahead in central banking
Our week ahead email helps you track the most important events in central banking. To see all of our emails and alerts visit www.ft.com/nbe
Bernanke testimony
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is due to speak on the economic outlook and federal budget situation on Thursday. He’s up in front of the House Committee on the Budget at 10.00 local time (15.00 GMT) on Thursday. Read more
Quantifying the QE boost
The impossibility of knowing what would have happened without quantitative easing, ie, the so-called “counterfactual”, means that estimating the impact asset purchases have had on the UK economy is more art than science.
Still, that doesn’t stop the Bank of England trying.
Weeks before announcing another £75bn-worth of asset purchases last October, the Bank published research saying that the first round of QE had meant growth was between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent higher than it would have otherwise been.
The Bank for International Settlements has had a go too. Its findings, published in December, found that QE had far less of an effect on gilt yields than the Bank had assumed.
In anticipation of more money printing next month, the Bank on Friday published three new papers which support its view that QE has substantially boosted the UK economy. Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
