Central banks

Update to lending and deposit spread of the Operational Standing Facility – Market Notice 8 December 2025

In line with the Bank's transition to a repo-led, demand-driven operational framework for providing reserves, the Bank is today announcing a reduction in the spread to Bank Rate of the Operational Standing Facility (OSF). This Market Notice confirms the new, recalibrated spread of the OSF at Bank Rate +15bps for the lending facility and Bank Rate -15bps for the deposit facility. As with all SMF facilities, the OSFs are 'open for business' and should be used by SMF participants for the purposes of liquidity management.

Asset prices, wealth inequality, and welfare: safe assets as a solution

Can rising asset prices reduce wealth inequality? This paper builds a continuous-time heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium in which entrepreneurs hold risky private capital and traditional savers hold safe assets. Safe-asset expansions—via financial innovation, public debt, or a stable equity bubble—operate through a single pass-through: they lower entrepreneurs’ undiversified risk exposure, compress risk premia, and raise the interest rate.

Asset prices, wealth inequality, and welfare: safe assets as a solution

Can rising asset prices reduce wealth inequality? This paper builds a continuous-time heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium in which entrepreneurs hold risky private capital and traditional savers hold safe assets. Safe-asset expansions—via financial innovation, public debt, or a stable equity bubble—operate through a single pass-through: they lower entrepreneurs’ undiversified risk exposure, compress risk premia, and raise the interest rate.

Banks’ regulatory risk tolerance

We employ 68 quarters of data – including from non-public supervisory sources – to study how 17 US and 17 euro-area banks balance the risk of breaching regulatory requirements against the cost of maintaining and speedily restoring “management” buffers. We find that steady-state management buffer targets systematically declined and regulatory risk tolerance (RRT) rose following the Great Financial Crisis, especially at banks experiencing a stronger increase in capital requirements.

Banks’ regulatory risk tolerance

We employ 68 quarters of data – including from non-public supervisory sources – to study how 17 US and 17 euro-area banks balance the risk of breaching regulatory requirements against the cost of maintaining and speedily restoring “management” buffers. We find that steady-state management buffer targets systematically declined and regulatory risk tolerance (RRT) rose following the Great Financial Crisis, especially at banks experiencing a stronger increase in capital requirements.

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