The 1960s were a period of crisis for the pound. Britain was on a fixed exchange rate system and needed to defend its currency with intervention on the foreign exchange market. To avoid a crisis, the Bank of England resorted to ‘window dressing’ the published reserve figures.
In the 1960s, the Bank came under pressure from two sides: first, publication of the Radcliffe report (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_report) forced publication of more transparent accounts. Second, with removal of capital controls in 1958, the Bank came under attack from international speculators (Schenk 2010). These contradictory pressures put the Bank in an awkward position. It needed to publish its reserve position (holdings of dollars and gold ) but it recognised that doing so could trigger a run on sterling, thereby creating a self-fulfilling currency crisis (see Krugman: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11032.pdf).
For a long time, the Bank had a reputation for the obscurity of its accounts and its lack of transparency. Andy Haldane (Chief Economist at the Bank) recognised, for ‘most of [it’s] history, opacity has been deeply ingrained in central banks’ psyche’.
(https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/a-little-more-conversation-a-little-less-action). One Federal Reserve (Fed) memo noted that the Bank of England took ‘a certain pride in pointing out that hardly anything can be inferred by outsiders from their balance sheet’, another that ‘it seems clear that the Bank of England is being pushed – by much public criticism – into giving out more information.’ However, the Bank did eventually publish reserve figures at a quarterly, and then monthly, frequency (Figure 1).
Transparency about the reserves created a risk for a currency crisis so in late 1966 the Bank developed a strategy for reporting levels that would not cause a crisis (Capie 2010). Figure 1 illustrates how ‘window dressing’ worked. The solid line reports the convertible reserves as published in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Bank of England. This information was available to market participants. The stacked columns show the actual daily dollar reserves. Spikes appear at monthly intervals, indicating the short-term borrowing that was used to ensure the reserves level was high enough on reporting days.
Figure 1. Published EEA convertible currency reserves vs. actual dollar reserves held at the EEA, 1962-1971.
The Bank borrowed dollars shortly before the reserve reporting day by drawing on swap lines (similar to the Fed in 2007 https://voxeu.org/article/central-bank-swap-lines). Swap drawings could be used overnight. Table 1 illustrates how window dressing worked using data from the EEA ledgers available at the archives of the Bank........MUCH MORE
