Graeme
Chief Operating Officer,
Markets
How does your work support the Bank’s core purposes?
There are two main core purposes at the Bank: monetary and financial stability. I work within the Markets directorate at the Bank and it feeds into both of those two core purposes. The Markets directorate implements the MPC’s (Monetary Policy Committee) interest rate and manages the government’s foreign exchange reserves and manages the Bank of England’s own balance sheet. It also conducts market intelligence which feeds into both of the two core purposes.
What does your department do?
I work in the Markets area, and the Bank’s financial operations for which we are responsible, have changed an awful lot over the last two years with the financial crisis. We now do much more frequent operations and against different types of securities. That means that we need to understand the risks we’re taking and implement those operations effectively and efficiently, and my department’s job is to do just that and to ensure that the risks are controlled and understood by the senior people in the Bank.
Tell us about your career with the Bank so far.
I’ve worked in the Bank for twenty years, and I’ve really enjoyed all the jobs that I’ve done within that time. I’ve been very lucky to move across a number of different departments. I started in the Economics area, and I worked in a number of teams within the Monetary Analysis directorate. I was fortunate to be there when the Inflation Report, which is the flagship product of the Monetary Analysis area of the Bank, was set up, so I was in at the start of that which allowed me to influence and help implement that new product.
I then moved to the Markets area of the Bank because I wanted to use my economics in a different kind of way, and that allowed me to work on the implementation of monetary policy i.e. the setting of interest rates, and all of the analytical work that went with that. I was also in that part of the Bank when the Bank’s independence was granted, so that meant that the Markets part of the Bank needed to change its focus, and focus a lot more on market intelligence, feeding into the two core purposes of monetary and financial stability.
I then moved to the Human Resources department and set up a new function to help manage and develop people’s careers at the Bank, which was a very fulfilling and rewarding experience, and allowed me to put back in a lot of what I’d learned over the previous dozen or so years. In the last four or five years, I’ve been working in the Markets part of the Bank again, focusing mostly on risk, which has been a fascinating experience during the last two years of the financial crisis.
Working in the Markets part of the Bank, it has undergone a lot of change in the last eighteen months with the financial crisis. What we’ve needed is to employ our analytical and problem-solving skills to real events as they emerge, often intra-day, so the fascinating thing is to see your work really being important to the senior people in the Bank and also people at the Treasury and to the wider public in the United Kingdom.
What makes the Bank a special place to work?
I think there are a number of things which make the Bank a special place to work. Job variety is certainly one of them. The Bank is a place where you can move around to different roles, taking skills with you from one job to another, building and developing on those as an individual, and contributing back to the Bank’s two core purposes. The quality of the individuals working in the Bank is also something which makes it a very special place to work, and the fact that it has a very unique mandate working on monetary policy and on financial stability.
There is only one place in the United Kingdom where you can work so closely on the implementation of monetary policy and implementation and setting of interest rates. And certainly over the last year and a half with the financial crisis, it has been a unique place to work, to see the financial crisis unfold, and the United Kingdom’s response to that crisis, both UK-specific but also globally as well.
The Bank has also got a unique relationship with outside firms, both banks, other financial institutions, and with other central banks of course. And watching all of that and working within that arena, also makes it a unique place to work.
Tell us something we didn’t know about the Bank.
The Bank is nicknamed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the funny thing is, the old lady, apparently, is said to exist. Two-hundred years ago Sarah Whitehead was the sister of a former employee of the Bank who was found guilty of forgery and subsequently executed. Poor Sarah, so the story goes, visited the Bank every day for the next 25 years to try and see her brother, and when she finally died, she was buried in the churchyard on which the Bank’s garden is currently now situated. So what is said, is that Sarah still stalks the corridors of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street to try and find her brother. I’ve never seen her myself though, I must say.