Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The financial crisis “would have been less costly” had policymakers been able to make the system more resilient and “moderate exuberance in the supply of credit,” the Bank of England said.

“Effective macro-prudential policy instruments are an important missing ingredient from the current policymaking toolkit,” the central bank said in inviting comment on a discussion paper on its Web site. “Had they existed, the current crisis might plausibly have been less costly for the real economy.”

Last week, the nine-member Monetary Policy Committee split three ways in a vote to extend the bond-purchase program to 200 billion pounds ($336 billion), and discussed lowering the deposit rate on bank reserves to encourage lending. They unanimously kept the benchmark interest rate at 0.5 percent.

The decision was the first three-way split since August 2008, before the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. exacerbated the financial crisis. A change in the deposit rate would expand the tools available to policy makers as they try to pull the U.K. out of its longest recession on record.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nandini Sukumar in London at nsukumar@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 21, 2009 08:05 EST