Historical Inflation and Interest Rates

As we know very well (since we are now painfully familiar with inflation being above target), a key part of inflation targeting is that the Monetary Policy Committee increases or decreases the Bank Rate in order to help inflation to come back to target. So, let’s take a look at the history of both the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and the Bank Rate focusing on the last 3 decades of inflation targeting.

What Powers the World?

What powers the world? How much comes from fossil fuels and how much from renewable energies? How much has this change since 1965? The Chart Of The Week shows the evolution of the energy mix from 1965 to today.

Europe’s Dependance on Russian Gas

The recent events in Ukraine have highlighted the importance for the EU and UK to diversify its energy sources. In particular, to reduce its dependency on Russia’s oil, natural gas, and coal.

Fan Charts

Since 1996 the Bank of England inflation forecast has been published as a probability distribution and presented in what is now known as ‘the fan chart’. This post provides an overview on this useful visualisation tool and its Python implementation.

The Two Piece Normal Distribution

The two-piece normal, also called split normal, binormal, or double-Gaussian,  results from joining at the mode the corresponding halves of two normal distributions with the same mode but different standard deviations.

Brief History of the Two-Piece Normal

A brief recollection of the history of the two-piece normal distribution discovery: 119 years from the first publication of Gustav Fechner original work until its latest re-discovery.

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