The ability to perform controlled experiments - a critical tool for scientific analysis - has been largely unavailable to economic researchers to date.

Threadneedle is designed to perform financial experiments, allowing questions over the influence of different forms of banking regulation, financial instrument and banking organisation on the economy to be explored.

For example, the indexed linked mortgage loans which are the commonest form of lending in Iceland, can be show to influence the money and credit supply quite differently to consumer loans in other countries, raising questions over their macro economic effects.

Experience from Threadneedle experiments even on very simple artificial economies suggest that the full ramifications of national and regional variations in the financial system is one of the most important open research questions of our time.