maseconomics

The Bank of England maintained Bank Rate at 3.75% in April 2026 after the Monetary Policy Committee voted 8–1 to hold policy steady. Bank of England explained means understanding more than one interest-rate decision. It means understanding how Britain’s central bank uses Bank Rate, inflation forecasts, financial-stability tools, and institutional independence to anchor the UK...

The Office for National Statistics estimated that real GDP grew by 0.5% in the three months to February 2026, while the International Monetary Fund projected 0.8% UK real GDP growth and 3.2% consumer price inflation for 2026. The UK economy is therefore expanding, but slowly, with services resilience offset by weak productivity, high public debt, expensive energy, and a trade...

The April inflation report landed on May 12 with a clear message for the Federal Reserve. The US CPI April 2026 release showed headline consumer prices rising 0.6 percent in April after a 0.9 percent increase in March, while the 12-month inflation rate accelerated to 3.8 percent from 3.3 percent. Energy explained much of the monthly pressure, but the deeper policy problem sat...

A regression between consumption and income can look excellent while being statistically false. Both series may trend upward, the fitted line may produce a high \(R^2\), and the t-statistics may look convincing. The statistical sin is spurious regression: non-stationary variables can appear related because they share stochastic trends, not because they obey a stable economic ...

In weekly fuel markets, crude oil prices often move before retail gasoline prices. That timing pattern is exactly where Granger Causality enters econometrics: it tests whether past values of one time series contain useful information for forecasting another time series after the target variable’s own history has already been included.

The method is not a claim about...