Why 'free money for everyone' wouldn't help anyone

Some commentators have suggested that instead of printing money and giving it to the banks, we should print money and gave it to the people. But that wouldn't do any good at all.

Last week brought a call from Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian for 'proper' money printing. He reckons that the best way to cope with the lack of demand in the UK economy is simply to give people money and set them free to spend it.

Under his plan we would print £14bn of bank notes and scatter them over shopping streets "the length and breadth of the land." Those who picked them up would have six months to spend them before they disintegrated and became unusable. Or, if scattering was deemed to messy, we could just hand the cash out in post offices to anyone with ID, ration-book style. Or we could skip the whole cash thing and hand out vouchers instead.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up
Explore More
Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.