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The Great Financial Crisis has been touted to be the worst crisis since the Great Depression of 1930; its effect has profound ramifications on the global economy. The nature and the severity of the crisis provoked an unprecedented policy response from policy makers at both global and domestic levels. To address the rampaging crisis, the Bank of England implemented a number of conventional and unconventional policy measures to curtail the economic rot and to stimulate economic growth. There is a broad consensus in the empirical literature and other evidence found in this paper that a number of the policies implemented in the United Kingdom played a significant role in re-directing and stimulating the economy. This paper reviews the various policy measures adopted by the Bank of England from the inception of the financial crisis in 2008 and assesses their effectiveness in bringing back the economy from the brink of collapse. Our review shows that quantitative easing (QE) policy and the expansionary fiscal policy adopted by the Bank of England were effective policy tools used in stimulating economic growth, stemming the effect and shortening the duration of the crisis in the United Kingdom

The study concentrates on the benefits of passive commodity investments in the context of the phenomenon of financialization. The research investigates the implications of increase in the correlation coefficients between equity and commodity investments for investors in financial markets. The paper is composed of several parts. First, the attributes of commodity investments and their benefits in the portfolio optimization are explored. Second, the phenomenon of the financialization is described and the research hypothesis is developed. Next, an empirical analysis is performed. I simulate the mean-variance spanning tests to examine the benefits of commodity investments before and after accounting for the impact of financialization. I proceed separate analysis for pre- and post-financialization period. The empirical research is based on asset classes’ returns and other related variables from years 1991-2012. The performed investigations indicate that the market financialization may have significant implications for commodity investors. Due to increase in correlation coefficients, the inclusion of the commodity futures in the traditional stock-bond portfolio appears to be no longer reasonable.

The paper concentrates on the value premium across countries and contributes to the investment and asset pricing literature in three ways. First, I provide fresh evidence that the high-value countries perform significantly better than the low-value countries. Additionally, this phenomenon is indifferent to the choice of the computational currency, representative index or value indicator. Second, I demonstrate that the value effect can be successfully amplified by combining with country-level size and momentum effects. Third, I show that returns to the high-value countries deteriorate in financial crisis conditions, because the country-level value premium is negatively correlated with the credit spreads, TED spread and expected volatility. I examine data from 66 markets between years 2000 and 2013.