Away from the Nobel economics prize announcement….HMV is preparing to exit its London flagship on Oxford Street in March - just over three years after reopening there with great fanfair – as the landlord proposed doubling the rent.

The entertainment retailer said it was now seeking alternative sites on the capital's main high street, or another central location, as it had been trading strongly, my colleague Sarah Butler reports.

The latest closure comes after returned to the site in November 2023 after closing in 2019 leaving the store empty for an extended period before a brief stint housing one of many American candy stores that popped up on Oxford Street during the pandemic.

, which currently has 114 stores under its own brand across the UK and a further six Fopp sites, said a proposed increase in rent which is already understood to be well over £1m a year – coupled with a requirement to fund substantial renovation works on the Oxford Street building – would make the store "commercially unsustainable", leaving it with no choice but to seek an alternative site.

The store was very first, and was opened in 1921 by Sir Edward Elgar, the British composer. Since then it has played host to a number of British bands, including a rooftop gig by Blur in 1995 and the Spice Girls' Christmas lights switch-on the following year.

It is understood the Hong Kong-based landlord has signed a lease with an alternative tenant.

, managing director of , said:

"This is a special store, it's where we began 100 years ago and bringing it back to life in 2023 was a big moment in our recent history. It's frustrating that it has been made commercially unviable. However, we are looking ahead, and our focus is now on what we do to make exciting steps for hmv in 2027."

He said sales were up by a quarter year-on-year at the Oxford Street store and 15% at established UK stores in the first nine months of 2026 as sales of both vinyl records and CDs continued to sell well and more shoppers came into stores.

"We have put together an offer that works across a number of generations," added.

The retailer is expecting UK revenues to exceed £240m this year across the stores estate and website, up from £212m in 2025. The business now generates £50m of sales online and is upgrading its website backed by a new warehouse set to open next year.

"We've worked hard to make 363 Oxford Street a destination for pop-culture fans, bringing live performances, artist signings and a huge range of music and entertainment back to the heart of London. However, regardless of how much a location means to us, it has to make commercial sense." said.

He said intended to redeploy affected staff through other London stores and Head Office roles.

After learning of his success, Michael Woodford was asked during today's press conference if any economic event or shock had ensured that his new framework had really stood up to the test.

Bloomberg has the details:

He cited how central banks adapted their toolkit to the global financial crisis of 2008 as they confronted a slump in demand that reductions in borrowing costs on their own couldn't solve.

"Forward guidance about policy, so making more explicit statements about the likely future path of interest rate policy as opposed to relying on simply being able to cut interest rates further immediately — that was an important part of the policy response," he said.

"It did contribute to better stabilization. It didn't magically solve the problem, but I think it was an important contribution."

Here's how John Hassler, chair of the prize committee, announced Hall and Woodford's success this morning:

"The laureates' work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,"

"With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume."

Over at FT Alphaville, Toby Nangle has described Michael Woodford is "probably the most famous New Keynesian economist".

(formally a senior asset manager at ) writes:

If you're friends with at least one econ nerd, you've probably heard either love or hate for Woodford's Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy dropped into dinner-party conversations. This is his reputation-defining tome, named cheekily to echo Knut Wicksell's Interest and Prices, written more than a century previously.

Woodford basically rebuilt Wicksell's insights around the relationship between interest rates and the economy's natural interest rate using modern general equilibrium economics.

And today, almost all central banks run dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models incorporating Woodfordian insights, including the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England, and the mother of them all: Sveriges Riksbank.

Robert Hall and Michael Woodford's success today means that 101 individuals have been awarded the economics prize, but only three are women.

The first, was in 2009, when she was recognised for her work exploring how people come together to preserve their collective resources.

followed a decade later, for work on an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

The third, Harvard professor , won in 2023 in recognition of her groundbreaking work examining wage inequality between men and women.

Following today's announcement, the Nobel prize for economics has now been awarded on 58 occasions.

That dates back to 1969, when and won it "for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes".

The oldest winner was , who was 90 in 2007 when he won alongside and "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".

The youngest remains , who was just 46 in 2019 when she shared the prize with and . "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty" (as we blogged here).

Analytics company , which had awarded both and one of its Citations Laureate – given to those who are considered likely to win the Nobel Prize due to their research expertise – says today's award is certainly merited.

, head of research analysis, institute for scientific information at Clarivate, explains:

"We are delighted to see both Robert Hall and Michael Woodford recognized with this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. Hall was named a Citation Laureate in 2017 and Woodford earlier this year in 2026, reflecting the exceptional influence of their research. Their work has fundamentally shaped modern thinking about economic stabilization, productivity, economic fluctuations and the role of monetary policy in supporting economic growth and stability.

Looking at the publication record in the Web of Science, we see the enduring impact of their contributions. Their research has influenced generations of economists and helped inform economic policymaking around the world, demonstrating how foundational ideas can shape both academic understanding and real-world decision-making for decades."

Economics professor of the says Woodford's work has lessons for UK policymakers today, as they try to unwind the stimulus measures implemented since the financial crisis.

He tells us:

I am very pleased Robert Hall and Michael Woodford have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Michael Woodford's work on Quantitative Easing (QE) policies, in particular, is very informative as it assesses the benefits of QE for financial stability by taking into account different assumptions about macro-prudential stability and whether interest rates are close to zero or not.

In essence, this is a very useful scenario-type of analysis that my co-author Christopher Mahon (visiting fellow at the Open University Business School) and I are now advocating in our new LSE Business Review blog which argues that Quantitative Tightening policies in the UK should rely on scenario testing to assess how alternative balance-sheet strategies perform cost-wise if interest rates follow different paths.

Robert Hall is also famous for coining the fresh water vs. salt water split in American macroeconomics.

This divide is both ideological and geographical.

A fresh water economist, Hall wrote 50 years ago, believes that economic fluctuations are largely attributable to supply shifts, and that the government is essentially incapable of affecting the level of economic activity. This leads to a belief in free markets, neoclassical price theory, rational expectations, and monetarism.

Freshwater economists tend to be based at inland universities located near the North American Great Lakes, such as the University of Chicago.

The salt water view holds shifts in demand responsible for fluctuations and thinks government policies (at least monetary policy) is capable of affecting demand, Hall argued.

Salt water economists thrive at the US coastal universities, such as Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, UCLA, and Columbia.

On his page at Stanford, Hall writes:

In a 1976 , I introduced the distinction between fresh-water and salt-water economists. Bloggers using these terms are asked to contribute $1 to a fund that sends graduate students to MIT for one year and to the University of Minnesota for a second year.

[The cheque is in the post, sir].

Michael Woodford was born in 1955 in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

He's based at Columbia University, New York, where he's the John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy.

According to Columbia:

Woodford has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Econometric Society, of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and of the Society for Economic Measurement, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.), a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), and a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network (Munich).

He was the 2007 recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, the 2018 recipient of the Banque de France/TSE Prize in Monetary Economics, and the 2024 recipient of the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics.

Robert Hall, the older of the pair, was born in 1943 in Palo Alto, California (the birth place of Silicon Valley).

is based at Stanford University, California, where he's the Robert and Carole McNeil Joint Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and professor in the department of economics.

On Stanford's website, describes himself as "an applied economist with interests in employment, inflation, technology, competition, and economic policy in the aggregate economy and in particular markets."

That work has included developing a framework for equitable and efficient consumption taxation, research into economic fluctuations and growth, and advising a number of government agencies on national economic policy.

Michael Woodford is now speaking to the Nobel prize commitee, by telephone.

He says he's "elated", as winning the prize is "a tremendous honour".

"It's a surprise, but I'm feeling very good about it," he adds.

now explaining how the 2008 financial crisis stretched the limits of traditional monetary policy, as interest rates fell to record lows, while unemployment was too high and aggregate spending was too low.

This meant other tools were needed, and one was 'forward guidance' about policy – more explicit statements about the future path of interest rates.

Robert Hall and Michael Woodford, who are both Americans, have been recognised for their work helping global policymakers to smooth out the highs and lows of economic cycles, through a branch of economics known as the New Keynesian paradigm.

Their models have "significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilisation policy", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences say.

This has allowed "well-timed fiscal and monetary policy measures" to reduce the economy's peaks and troughs.

This work built on work showing how policymakers could stimulate demand when it is too low and slowing it when it's too high.

work struggled during the oil crises of the 1970s, which strained its assumption that the relationship between the macroeconomic variables was stable.

and , though, showed that such models have to be built on microfoundations- ie, from the bottom up, based on the behaviour of individual actors.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences say:

Robert E. Hall's and research has made us better equipped to manage economic downturns. They laid the foundation of the , in which models are built upon , which means from the bottom up.

Economic outcomes are the result of millions of decisions made at the microlevel by households and businesses. Using models based upon this approach, rather than simply studying the economy from a macro perspective, like a bird's eye view, Hall's and Woodford's research has generated a paradigm shift in the theory of stabilisation policy.

Economic development is characterised by alternating downturns and upturns. Stimulating or slowing down the economy at the right time can provide stability and allow us to avoid drawn-out recessions or runaway inflation. Robert E. Hall's and Michael Woodford's research has generated a paradigm shift in stabilisation policy.

New Keynesian models, a result of their research, allow us to explain and quantify how stabilisation policy affects business cycles and are now used by central banks and finance ministries around the world.

Newsflash: The Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded to Robert E Hall and Michael Woodford, for their work on the "microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation".

[Reminder: As we flagged earlier, was among the predicted winners – he's one of the architects of modern forward guidance, the idea that central banks can control the economy through influencing public expectations about inflation, rather than just through interest rates.]

The veriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is worth 12 million Swedish kronor (£900,000), plus the glory of course, and the knowledge that every pronouncement you make now comes with the authority of a Nobel Prize winner.

The winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics, the final award in this year's cycle, is expected to be announced in around 10 minutes time.

You can watch the announcement, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, here:

Reminder: The prize is formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Sweden's central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.

Monetary policy, technology, behavioural economics and development are among the fields tipped for this year's Nobel economics prize, the AFP newswire report.

Last year, the economics award went to American-Israeli , France's and Canada's for research into how technology drives and affects growth.

That makes another prize for the same field unlikely this year, according to experts interviewed by .

"There is obvious horse-trading between factions in the (Nobel) committee: 'I support your candidate this year if you support mine next year,'" Richard Tol, an economics professor at the University of Sussex, told .

For Tol, the committee has been "signalling" that Americans and will win this year, "perhaps with ", pioneers in behavioural economics and how we make decisions.

Another "strong candidate" is in the field of monetary policy, said David Pendlebury of research firm Clarivate, which predicts potential laureates by tracking highly cited academic work.

"It has been a while since that particular area has been recognised," Pendlebury noted.

Looking at past laureates also shows that the Nobel committee tends to honour research about 20 to 25 years after publication, and Woodford's key work was "a book published in 2003".