Speeches by Baldwin.

“All your forecasts do show unemployment going up, including the central forecast, don’t they?”

“Indeed. Governor, we heard from the chief economist last time about how he empathised with young people because it was something that he was seeing in his own family. I just wondered what assessment you have made of the impact that artificial intelligence might be having on those entry-level positions, but also how you…”

“Do your staff have the resources to come up with their own tax revenue projections?”

“Would they be quite substantial resources that you have allocated to that?”

“That is set in law.”

“If a Chancellor wanted to reduce the number of resources at the Office for Budget Responsibility by cutting the budget, what checks and balances could there be in the system to prevent that from happening?”

“I would like to start by asking Professor Elmendorf how the interaction works between the Congressional Budget Office and the Executive. One thing that the Office for Budget Responsibility has here is the privileged access to the Treasury, what it is planning to do, what the measures are, what the assumptions are and w…”

“In terms of the independence of the Office for Budget Responsibility, would you say that that independence of the resources that it has is a crucial question? How would you strengthen the independence of the resources that the Office for Budget Responsibility currently has from the Executive?”

“I mean the resources that it uses to either employ people or develop models, so the things that it uses to produce its output.”

“I just wanted to pick up on the point that Professor Elmendorf raised about assessing legislation that is in process. We have had a situation in the last couple of years where the Planning and Infrastructure Bill got scored by the Office for Budget Responsibility whereas the Employment Rights Bill did not. Although the…”

“Where do you think things have got to on Solvency II? Is there still more that the PRA might be doing in terms of the changes to insurance capital requirements?”

“We have had feedback from industry about how it can be quite slow and bureaucratic.”

“Turning to a couple of the other reforms, I think the PRA has a role to play in the senior managers regime. Where do you see those reforms as having got to? Is that an area where you think more reform is needed?”

“I took the legislation through.”

“By the PRA itself?”

“It has been widely reported that the Bank is going through a round of redundancies. Have you been told how that might affect the people who work for you at the PRA? Just to put it out there, my worry was that I read that the redundancies were very much a voluntary process. That tends to mean that you lose all your best…”

“And so did John. I want to pick up on something you mentioned in your questionnaire. You say that sovereign debt pressures are one of the main risks to UK financial stability. Obviously, today there was an auction of 10-year gilts that went for over 4.9%—the highest level for 20 years—so to what extent do you want to e…”

“Would it affect regulated firms mainly through the impact on their mortgage books, or do they hold substantial portions of gilts unhedged themselves?”

“Do you see the UK gilt market as being particularly risky at the moment? If you are paying that level of interest rate, debt in this country is obviously going to compound much faster unless we can get better nominal and real growth in the economy.”

“I should put it on the record that I worked with Ms Braddick when I was Economic Secretary—”