Why £50bn isn’t enough to make banks cut mortgage rates

Despite the £50bn injection, it doesn’t matter how much money the government tries to force through the system - mortgage rates won't be coming down anytime soon...

Well, as I suspected, it doesn't look like the Bank of England's £50bn injection is going to bring down mortgage rates any time soon.

Mervyn King has been broadly applauded for the way he's put this package together. £50bn which can rise, depending on demand of short-term government bonds will be available to banks in exchange for high-quality mortgage debt.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.