Ooh Darling with this quantitative easing you’re really spoiling us
The Credit Crunch question: despite the several denials, at last Darling has found the answer and it’s called “quantitative easing”. Which is essentially.. printing money. Genius, huh?
Giving it a name which sounds more like a constipation remedy is very apt: pump some crap (here, 150bn GBP) in to get our crap (here, the economy) moving. Apt but also jargon – what will the Plain English campaign make of this?
The thinking must be – and this is typical management speak, perhaps the result of blue sky thinking – that giving it a more opaque name will make us all think there’s something more subtle involved than printing money, and that they know what they’re doing, over on Threadneedle St. Besides, ‘printing money’ has had overtones of the last chance saloon and ineptitude ever since GCSE History when we were taught that that was where the Weimar Republic went wrong
And who started it? The Japanese actually. And then the Yanks did it. So.. tried and tested: it must be ok. No?