soontobe The amount of QE injected into the banks in 2009 and 2012 was apparently £325 billion and the rationale for such drastic action was to prevent the financial institutions going bankrupt. You would think that after this scare the banks would be more cautious about their lending and less keen to accede to the demands of senior bankers who have continued to be paid amounts that most people can only dream of.
A Guardian article this month reported:
"The number of households struggling with problem debt grew by a quarter between 2012 and last year, as stagnating wages forced a growing number to borrow to get by, according to the TUC.
"By 2014, 3.2 million families were spending at least 25% of their gross monthly pay on servicing unsecured debts"
So, in effect, we still have QE and it is being used not to improve the infrastructure and create jobs but to make up the shortfall between people's earnings and their outgoings. That, in my opinion, is why what is essentially a wage freeze will in the long run cause great problems.
It is surely more sensible, if you're going to create money, to use it to take measures to reduce the country's energy use, to improve the infrastructure and to provide good quality training so that we have a literate and skilled workforce?
Though Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor of the Telegraph, takes issue with some of Corbyn's ideas re the economy, he seems to rather approve of PQE, saying:
??The rich have made a killing off QE. Next time, it should be directed into the veins of the real economy......
"......... he [Corbyn] is right that investment levels in Britain are woefully low by the standards of OECD peers, an underlying cause of our chronic account deficit, now the worst in the developed world at 6pc of GDP.......
"If the private sector will not rise to the challenge, it is up to the state to take on the responsibility......"