The Bank of England, 1696-1914

The Bank of England, 1696-1914
June 7, 2015

In the past, we looked at the Bank of England’s balance sheet during the 18th and 19th centuries:

March 24, 2013: The Bank of England, 1720-1913
April 14, 2013: The Bank of England, 1844-1913
May 5, 2012: The Bank of England, 1904-1905

This data was compiled from appendices to books of history. Since that time, the Bank of England itself has released some new data, which includes the annual balance sheet series from 1696 to 2014. Here’s the link:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/onebank/threecenturies.xlsx

The data has a bit of an oddity, in the form of a “notes in the bank” annotation which seems to be a sort of vault cash. It is on both the asset and liabilities side. I think it is largely irrelevant. Thus, total assets and liabilities are denoted net of these “notes in the bank.”

Here’s a little data from the 1900-1938 period. Alas, it would really be better if we had monthly data from this period. This updates a little dataset I had earlier:

January 5, 2014: The Bank of England, 1913-1927
July 20, 2014: The Bank of England, 1914-1941