Huw Pill: Monetary policy and central bank asset purchases - substitutes and complements

Text of the Beesley Lecture by Mr Huw Pill, Chief Economist and Executive Director for Monetary Analysis of the Bank of England, at the Institute of Directors, London, 23 November 2022.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
24 November 2022

Good evening everyone.

It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to speak here at the Institute of Directors and participate in the long-running Beesley Lecture series.

As his prodigious academic record and contributions to public policy attest, Professor Michael Beesley was among the most influential industrial and regulatory economists of his day.

With the passage of time, his advocacy of road pricing in the 1960s looks increasingly prescient. And, even after almost four decades, his guidance of privatisation and shaping of the subsequent regulatory environment continue to govern the structure of important UK network industries, such as rail and telecoms.

It is a great honour to have this opportunity to contribute to the lecture series he created.

Professor Beesley's expertise lay in industrial and regulatory economics, whereas at the Bank of England my focus is – naturally enough – on monetary and macro economics. I had originally hoped to bridge this gap by discussing how the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) seeks to 'regulate' price developments by steering CPI inflation back to it 2% target.