Easing quantitative easing

As if to prove that I am wasted in this job unemployment, as I asked the question about quantitatitatitative easing, my old chums at Prospect were preparing a long winded answer: Faisal Islam on The Great Money Mystery. It turns out that even though my basic question was, well, quite basic, other questions, vaguely similar to mine, were relatively sensible.

“It was one of the many measures to get confidence back in the system,” says former chancellor Alistair Darling, the man who had to sign off on the Bank of England experiment. “Nobody really knows what impact it’s having,” he says with shocking candour. “Look at the Bank of England [monetary policy committee] minutes, even they are split.”

Quantitative difficulting

Some of you may have heard of quantitative easing, which is apparently a euphemism for printing money, where the government gets down the value of money (and hence its debts) and inflates the economy by printing more cash and then dishing it out, so there's more to go around. Which is fine and all, economics primer stuff by all accounts, but how do they get the extra money into the economy? Stuffing a few extra tenners in wage packets? Programming ATMs to dish out bonus notes to economonically-approved spenders? Does the secret service go around un-pickpocketing tourists in central London? Or do they just give it to their mates in the City to piss up the wall again? If only there was some way I could find out...

reads wikipedia for 30 seconds

Ah, seems that what they do is print some money and then use that money to give to their mates in the City to piss up the wall again buy financial assets from banks, who then have loads of lovely lolly to pay themselves in bonuses lend out to the masses and hence kickstart the moribund economy pay themselves in bonuses

Beautiful. Got that sorted. Happy cuts day to y'all

regrets, I've had a few

Meet the man who sold his 10% share in Apple for $800. (via)