RE: Hope there is a takeover bid of £1.2b1 Sep 2022 11:41
From the Evening Standard
City Comment: The Bank of England needs to go for it
THE letter to the FT is blunt. The banking crisis needed a £150 billion intervention from the Bank of England. The Covid pandemic about the same.
And the present energy crisis? A cool £200 billion, magicked out of thin air via quantitative easing, money-printing if you prefer, though the actual process is electronic.
Learned professors David Blanchflower, Lord Sikka and Richard Murphy aren’t long on optimism. A sample: “millions of jobs will be lost”, “mortgage repossessions will increase”, “the likelihood of recession on a scale not seen since the 1930s is very high”.
Are you cheered up yet? The Profs point is that none of these disasters have to happen. The Bank just needs to go big, because it is the only entity that can really save us all from catastrophe.
Since it seems a matter of near inevitability that the next Prime Minister will have to tell the Bank to take radical action, it’s not clear what the point is in waiting.
Let’s assume we won’t actually allow the poor and the old to freeze to death this winter. That when it comes to it, we will find, or invent, the money to cover fuel bills, making vague talk from politicians about cuts to income tax or VAT look rather twee.
The objections to the Bank spaffing money about will be that it could fuel inflation and that well, it sounds like a lot.
But inflation is driven by global forces that there isn’t a lot the Bank can do about it.
And not spending money now to avert disaster later won’t be cheaper in the end.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
