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Quantitative easing: how the world got hooked on magicked-up money
The world economy is a mess. The system, notionally governed by the invisible hand of the market, is no longer governed in any meaningful way: private excess puffs up bubbles that government indulgence ensures can never burst. We seem condemned to volatile commodity prices, wild capital flows, worsening imbalances in trade, taxation and income, and—before long—the next sovereign debt crisis. And then there’s inequality. During lockdown, the total wealth of billionaires rose by $5 trillion to $13 trillion in 12 months, the most dramatic surge ever registered on the annual Forbes billionaire list.
Where do such riches come from? Compared to before the pandemic, there’s less real economic activity: we are collectively poorer. And yet within a year of the great panic of March 2020, many asset prices were surging. Wall Street and the City of London are again awash with liquidity—and in a speculative mood. One vogue is for something called SPACs, or “special purpose acquisition companies.” That sounds so vague as to bring to mind the South Sea Bubble companies of 1720, whose pitch is remembered as “carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is.”
How is this mismatch between financial markets and underlying reality possible? Because just like in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the civil servants in our central banks spotted the dreadful potential of unchecked panic, and rode to the rescue of private speculators by flushing the system with made-up money through a process we’ve come to know as quantitative easing.
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Ann Pettifor: If I governed the Bank of England, here’s what I do
Ann Pettifor: If I governed the Bank of England, here’s what I do
The radical economist outlines how she’d overhaul the UK’s broken economy.
If such an implausible appointment were ever to be made by a Labour chancellor, I would regard it as a great honour. The Bank of England stands at the pinnacle of Britain’s monetary system, which I regard as one of Britain’s great public goods. It is as vital to our economic health as the sanitation system is to public health. The development of the monetary system and the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 represented – despite all its flaws – a great civilisational advance. As the £1,000 billion bailout of the banking sector in 2007-9 proved, thanks to our monetary system, there need never be a shortage of money. We need never lack the money for all that society regards as vital to economic, social, political and ecological stability. I write that with feeling, having worked in countries that lack a developed monetary system, and therefore have no money.
The Bank of England, explained the governor Mark Carney recently, is ‘the only game in town’. The bank’s power – or at least the power of its civil servants and monetary policy committee members – was greatly enhanced during the Blair government. Under Gordon Brown’s watch one of the most important economic tools available to any government – the power to determine the rate of interest (bank rate) – was delegated to a committee of unelected men (and the occasional woman) at the Bank of England. Brown made clear in 1997 that the monetary policy committee was expected to wield this great power independently of parliament’s scrutiny.
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