Paul Maunders | Web log

For the past 10 years I’ve been undecided as to whether Britain should join the European single currency, the Euro.
At first I was leaning towards the Euro, thinking that a level playing field of prices across Europe would encourage competition, making prices more transparent across a larger market, and therefore bring down prices in [...]

As regular readers of my and / or Brendan’s blog and twitter feeds may know, we have been looking into how to set up a bank. The primary reason being that if the Bank of England embarks on a policy of quantitative easing (otherwise known as printing money / helicopter money), then we want to [...]

I just found a cool tool on the Bank of England site for anyone interested in financial / monetary stats. Basically the Interactive Stats Tool lets you search through a huge amount of statistical releases and then download them in either CSV, Excel, XML or HTML formats.
Here’s some examples of what you can get:

Average 3-month [...]

Ways and Means Advances to HM Government is an entry that appears on the Bank of England’s Balance Sheet. As of the end of 2008, the figure stood at £369,847,840. Prior to 2000, this was basically the Government’s overdraft facility. The Bank of England provided a short term loan to balance the governments day to [...]

As part of my ongoing research into money I’ve been trying to understand the Bank of England’s balance sheet, and while looking through it I noticed an account called Cash ratio deposits.
At first I thought this was something to do with Reserve Requirements (sometimes known as the cash asset ratio or liquidity ratio), where [...]

This is the first post of what I hope will become a series of posts on my blog to discover what money is and how it works. We take money for granted as something that can be exchanged for goods and services, but it is in fact a complicated instrument who’s real value and supply [...]