BoE Quarterly Bulletin

The Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, shortened to Quarterly Bulletin or QB, is a flagship publication of the Bank of England. The Bank is the UK's central bank. It has appeared quarterly since December 1960, following a 1959 Radcliffe Committee recommendation, and covers UK monetary and financial stability.

It is not a survey, index, headline number or rate decision. It offers market commentary and medium-term research. It differs from the Inflation Report, the Monetary Policy Report and the Financial Stability Report.

New material appears quarterly, labelled Q1 to Q4. Each article page shows only a publication date, with no fixed calendar day, time or time zone. Year pages group articles under each year. Each release brings research articles with charts, tables, footnotes, references and author names, plus commentary on sterling markets and the Bank's official operations.

There is no bulletin-wide revision rule, since each article follows its own cited sources. The publisher states no buy or sell rule. Readers can contact the bulletin team by email. Older issues add forewords, speech summaries and data annexes.

It has no fixed drivers or weights, since it is commentary and research, not a number.

• Summary or foreword: editorial framing that sets out what the issue covers.
• Markets and operations: quarterly review of sterling financial markets and the Bank's official operations, with notes on market functioning.
• Research articles: medium-term studies of monetary transmission, supply chains, climate, housing and SME finance.
• Speeches and summaries: early full speeches and later summaries, such as the Governor's Mansion House speech.
• Working-paper summaries: short summaries of detailed Bank staff research papers.
• Statistical annex and Agents' scores: older statistical tables, the Agents' scores on business conditions, and FX and derivatives market reports.

An article published 15 December 2023 on buy-to-let, or rented homes bought with a mortgage, shows this research role. It found 19% of UK households rent privately, and about 45% of those live in homes with a buy-to-let mortgage.

The sector is about 9% of the housing stock by number, worth about £300 billion, or about 18% of the overall mortgage market. Loan stock rose from £9 billion in 2000 to £140 billion in 2008, then growth slowed and arrears, or missed payments, topped 3%. The lesson is that risk channels differ, and stronger checks under 2016 Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) rules limited lender losses. The Financial Policy Committee (FPC) held powers of Direction over such lending but had not used them.

1. No bulletin formula: There is no bulletin-wide calculation, weight or seasonal adjustment method. The Bulletin is a set of articles, not a computed index.
2. Chart and table rule: Unless stated otherwise, chart and table data come from the Bank or the Office for National Statistics (ONS). All data except financial markets data are seasonally adjusted.
3. No worked example: No example can be built without inventing steps, so none is given.