The onus of UK macroeconomic policy falls on the Bank of England. George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, has nailed his colours to the mast of fiscal discipline instead. Whatever wheezes appear in next week’s Budget are likely make little difference to immediate performance, as my colleague, Chris Giles, pointed out last week. This does not make the Budget unimportant. As Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has also noted, a tax system devoid of principles and rife with gimmicks is unpredictable and so a source of damaging uncertainty. But that is, alas, unlikely to change.
The big macroeconomic doubt is whether “quantitative easing” works. The sums involved are startling. At the end of its third round of asset purchases, the BoE will own £325bn of financial assets, predominantly government bonds (or gilts), which it will have bought with newly created money. It will own close to a third of the gilt market.
Yes, this is monetisation. So is it effective? Is it even dangerous?