The Bank of England (‘the Bank’) is carrying out a Bank Capital Stress Test in 2025. Stress testing is used by the Bank to determine the UK banking system’s ability to withstand an adverse scenario while continuing to support the real economy. By doing so the Bank aims to ensure banks can absorb rather than amplify shocks and have the capacity to continue to serve UK households and businesses.
The 2025 Bank Capital Stress Test will assess the resilience of the UK banking system to deep simultaneous recessions in the UK and global economies, large falls in asset prices, higher global interest rates, and a stressed level of misconduct costs.
The stress scenario is not a forecast of macroeconomic and financial conditions. Rather, like previous concurrent stress test scenarios, it is intended to be a coherent ‘tail risk’ scenario designed to be severe and broad enough to allow the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) and Prudential Regulation Committee (PRC) to assess the resilience of UK banks to a range of adverse shocks. It is not a set of events that is expected, or likely, to materialise. This tail risk scenario is used for the purposes of enhancing financial stability and promoting the safety and soundness of UK banks. It is distinct from scenarios that the Monetary Policy Committee may use to illustrate the uncertainties around its forecasts.
The hypothetical stress scenario in the test is designed to be severe but plausible and related to the financial cycle in a countercyclical way. It includes a severe negative global aggregate supply shock, which leads to deep recessions across countries including the UK. In the scenario, heightened geopolitical tensions lead to increases in commodity prices. World trade fragments leading to a material disruption in supply chains. This leads to a sharp rise in inflation, and central banks increase interest rates in response. Advanced economy government bond yields rise.
For the 2025 Bank Capital Stress Test, the largest and most