As regular readers of my and / or Brendan's blog and twitter feeds may know, we have been looking into how to set up a bank. The primary reason being that if the Bank of England embarks on a policy of quantitative easing (otherwise known as printing money / helicopter money), then we want to get a piece of the action. We certainly have plenty of ideas for cash yielding investments to spend it on!
Anyway if we get past the formalities and set up our bank, how do we go about borrowing money from the Bank of England?
Unfortunately, I couldn't quite find a simple answer to this on the Bank of England's website, but I think the process comes down to the following 3 steps:
- Become a Bank.
- Have some eligible securities to use as collateral.
- Swap your securities for cash.
If you read through the eligible securities section on their site, you will see that it basically just includes things like government bonds. This is not really much good to us, as we would need to use our cash to buy the bonds in the first place, in order to borrow the same amount back. However, there may be a solution, the Discount Window Facility (DWF).
The purpose of the DWF is to provide liquidity insurance to the banking system. The Discount Window Facility is not intended for firms facing fundamental problems of solvency or viability. Eligible banks and building societies may borrow gilts, for up to 30 days, against a wide range of collateral in return for a fee, which will vary with the collateral used and the total size of borrowings.
Institutions eligible to participate will be banks and building societies that are required to pay cash ratio deposits (CRDs) and which otherwise meet the requirements for eligibility, as determined by the Bank, for the Bank’s Sterling Monetary Framework facilities.
The key point here is that they say they will accept a wide range of collateral in exchange for government bonds (gilts). Presumably, the gilts could then be used to borrow hard cash using their standard lending facilities.
If they are willing to accept poison assets such as dodgy loan books from mortgage lenders, then I don't see why they wouldn't accept shares in companies, or loans to businesses.
Issues to solve:
- What is required to become a bank (or more correctly, a monetary financial institutions)?
- Will the bank accept shares in private companies as collateral, or a loan book that is made up of advances to start ups and other small businesses?
- If the loans are for 30 days, can they be rolled over each month?
- Are there any other schemes to borrow money from the BoE on a longer term basis?
Here's the application form.