The Bank of England has expanded its quantitative easing (QE) programme in response to the second English lockdown. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted last week to buy £150bn more government bonds with printed money, taking the total value of its quantitative easing programme to £895bn, about 40% of 2019 UK GDP. The Bank also forecast that it will be early 2022 before the UK economy returns to its pre-pandemic level.
The Bank’s new bout of bond-buying comes as government borrowing spirals ever higher, says Liam Halligan in The Daily Telegraph. Since March, the Bank has printed “more than three times what we spend on the NHS in an entire year”. Soon it will “own almost half the entire store of UK public debt”. The “historic precedents” for such rampant money-printing are hardly comforting. That such a “dangerous and controversial economic policy” has been undertaken with scarcely any public debate is “utterly mad”.
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