People's Quantitative Easing

People’s quantitative easing

13 September 2015

Jeremy Corbyn, the newly elected leader of the Labour Party, is proposing a number of radical economic policies. One that has attracted considerable attention is for a new form of QE, which has been dubbed ‘people’s quantitative easing’.

This would involve newly created money by the Bank of England being directly used to fund spending on large-scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects. Rather than the new money being used to purchase assets, as has been the case up to now, with the effect filtering only indirectly into aggregate demand and even more indirectly into aggregate supply, under the proposed scheme, both aggregate demand and aggregate supply would be directly boosted.

Although ‘conventional’ QE has worked to some extent, the effects have been uneven. Asset holders and those with large debts, such as mortgages, have made large gains from higher asset prices and lower interest rates. By contrast, savers in bank and building society accounts have seen the income from their savings decline dramatically. What is more, the indirect nature of the effects has meant time lags and uncertainty over the magnitude of the effects.

But despite the obvious attractiveness of the proposals, they have attracted considerable criticism. Some of these are from a political perspective, with commentators from the right arguing against an expansion of the state. Other criticisms focus on the operation and magnitude of the proposals

One is that it would change the relationship between the Bank of England and the government. If the Bank of England created money to fund government projects, that would reduce or even eliminate the independence of the Bank. Independence has generally been seen as desirable to prevent manipulation of the central bank by the government for short-term political gain. Those in favour of people’s QE argue that the money would be directed into a National Investment Bank, which would then make the investment allocation decisions. The central bank would still be independent in deciding the amount of QE.

This leads to the second criticism and that is about whether further QE is necessary at the current time. Critics argue that while QE of whatever type was justified when the economy was in recession and struggling to recover, now would be the wrong time for further stimulus. Indeed, it could be highly inflationary. The economy is currently expanding. If banks respond by increasing credit, the velocity of circulation of narrow money could rise and broad money supply grow, providing enough money to underpin a growing economy.

Many advocates of people’s QE accept this second point and see it as a contingency plan in case the economy fails to recover and further monetary stimulus is deemed necessary. If further QE is not felt necessary by the Bank of England, then the National Investment Bank could fund investment through conventional borrowing.

The following articles examine people’s QE and look at its merits and dangers. Given the proposal’s political context, several of the articles approach the issue from a very specific political perspective. Try to separate the economic analysis in the articles from their political bias.

Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal
The Economy in 2020 Jeremy Corbyn (22/7/15)

Articles
People’s quantitative easing — no magic Financial Times, Chris Giles (13/8/15)
How Green Infrastructure Quantitative Easing would work Tax Research UK, Richard Murphy (12/3/15)
What is QE for the people? Money Week, Simon Wilson (22/8/15)
QE or not QE? A slippery slope to breaking the Bank EconomicsUK.com, David Smith (23/8/15)
We don’t need “People’s QE”, basic economic literacy is enough Red Box, Jonathan Portes (13/8/15)
Is Jeremy Corbyn’s policy of ‘quantitative easing for people’ feasible? The Guardian, Larry Elliott (14/8/15)
Corbynomics: Quantitative Easing for People (PQE) Huffington Post, Adnan Al-Daini (7/9/15)
Corbyn’s “People’s QE” could actually be a decent idea FT Alphaville, Matthew C. Klein (6/8/15)
Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘People’s QE’ would force Britain into three-year battle with the EU The Telegraph, Peter Spence (15/8/15)
Would Corbyn’s ‘QE for people’ float or sink Britain? BBC News, Robert Peston (12/8/15)
Strategic Quantitative Easing – public money for public benefit New Economics Foundation blog, Josh Ryan-Collins (12/8/15)
People’s QE and Corbyn’s QE Mainly Macro blog, Simon Wren-Lewis
You can print money, so long as it’s not for the people The Guardian, Zoe Williams (4/10/15)

Questions

1. What is meant by ‘helicopter money’? How does it differ from quantitative easing as practised up to now?
2. Is people’s QE the same as helicopter money?
3. Can people’s QE take place alongside an independent Bank of England?
4. What is meant by the velocity of circulation of money? What happened to the velocity of circulation following the financial crisis?
5. How does conventional QE feed through into aggregate demand?
6. Under what circumstances would people’s QE be inflationary?

Quantitative Easing

Most of the money in our economy is created by banks when they make loans. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis, banks stopped lending, and so stopped creating new money. 

At the same time, people were still repaying their loans, meaning money was being ‘destroyed‘ and the total amount of money in the economy was shrinking. To counter this and to ‘replace’ the money that banks were destroying, the Bank of England created £375 billion of new money through a scheme called Quantitative Easing (QE). As the Governor of the Bank of England said at the time:

“[A] damaged banking system means that today banks aren’t creating enough money. We have to do it for them.”

- Sir Mervyn King, then-Governor of the Bank of England, speaking in 2012

How does Quantitative Easing work? 

In the press, QE was generally presented as “The Bank of England prints money and lends this to banks so that they can increase their lending into the economy”, but this is completely inaccurate.

In reality, through QE the Bank of England purchased financial assets – almost exclusively government bonds – from pension funds and insurance companies. It paid for these bonds by creating new central bank reserves – the type of money that bank use to pay each other. The pension funds would sell the bonds to the Bank of England and in exchange, they would receive deposits (money) in an account at one of the major banks, say RBS. RBS would end up with the new deposit (a liability from it to the pension fund), and a new asset – central bank reserves at the Bank of England.

Quantitative Easing therefore simultaneously increased a) the amount of central bank money, which is used in the system that banks use to pay each other, and b) the amount of commercial bank money (deposits in the bank accounts of people and companies). Only the deposits can actually be spent in the real economy, as central bank reserves are just for internal use between banks and the Bank of England.

(See the further reading section below for a more in-depth explanation of the process).

Why was Quantitative Easing ineffective in boosting GDP?

The problem was that the money created through QE was used to buy government bonds from the financial markets (pension funds and insurance companies). The newly created money therefore went directly into the financial markets, boosting bond and stock markets nearly to their highest level in history. The Bank of England itself estimates that QE boosted bond and share prices by around 20% (Source). In theory, this should make people feel wealthier so that they spend more. However, 40% of the stock market is owned by the wealthiest 5% of the population, so while most families saw no benefit from Quantitative Easing, the richest 5% of households would have each been up to £128,000 better off (according to Strategic Quantitative Easing, p28, by the New Economics Foundation).

Very little of the money created through QE boosted the real (non-financial) economy. The Bank of England estimates that the £375 billion of QE led to 1.5-2% growth in GDP. In other words, through QE it takes £375 billion of new money just to create £23-28bn billion of extra spending in the real economy. It’s incredibly ineffective, because it relies on boosting the wealth of the already-wealthy and hoping that they increase their spending. In other words, it relies on a ‘trickle down’ theory of wealth.

A far more effective way to boost the economy would have been for the Bank of England to create money, grant it directly to the government, and allow the government to spend it directly into the real economy. This is the approach we have advocated in our paper “Sovereign Money: Paving the Way for a Sustainable Recovery“, and pound for pound of stimulus, it would be many times more effective than Quantitative Easing.

Read more

How money is destroyed

As we have seen, when banks make loans, new money (in the form of numbers in somebody’s bank account) is created. What happens when these loans are repaid? Exactly the opposite – money is destroyed.

Read more

Quantitative Easing

People's QE and Corbyn’s QE

Politicians can be adept at co-opting attractive sounding terms to their own cause, even when they distort their meaning while doing so. Osborne announced what was in reality a partial but large increase in the minimum wage, but he called it a ‘living wage’. This was especially devious, as calculations of the actual living wage take into account the tax credits that Osborne was at the same time cutting.

Is Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Peoples QE’ an example of the same thing? It is certainly true that the way that some macroeconomists, including myself, have used the term is different from Corbyn’s idea. For us Peoples QE is just another term for helicopter money. Helicopter money was a term first used by that well known radical Milton Friedman. It involves the central bank creating money, and distributing it directly to the people by some means. It is a sure fire way [1] for the central bank to boost demand: what economists sometimes call a money financed fiscal stimulus.

The idea has been recently revived, most prominently in the UK by Adair Turner, because of the failure of conventional monetary policy (changing interest rates) to bring a quick end to the Great Recession, which in turn is because governments were undertaking fiscal austerity (a bond financed fiscal contraction) rather than fiscal stimulus. In contrast central banks in Japan, the US and UK, and now the Eurozone, have been creating money to buy financial assets (mainly government debt), which is called Quantitative Easing (QE). Hence the term People’s QE for helicopter money: instead of the central bank creating money to buy assets, it creates money and gives it to the people.

The genesis of Corbyn’s QE seems rather different. Corbyn adviser Richard Murphy had previously suggested what he called a Green Infrastructure QE, which is that a “new [QE] programme should buy the new debt that will be issued in the form of bonds by the Green Investment Bank to fund sustainable energy, local authorities to pay for new houses, NHS trusts to build new hospitals and education authorities to build schools.” This in turn is related to two ideas: first a near universal view among macroeconomists that public sector investment in infrastructure should be rising not falling when interest rates are low and labour is cheap, and second that a National Investment Bank (NIB) might be useful in helping to encourage private sector investment. (See, for example, the recommendations of the LSE growth commission.)

The main difference between helicopter money and Corbyn’s QE therefore seems to be where the money created by the central bank goes: to individuals in the form of a cheque from the central bank, or to financing investment projects. I think that is wrong, and to see why we need to ask an obvious question: what is this policy innovation designed to achieve. I think it is here that confusion has arisen.

As I noted above, the idea behind helicopter money is to provide a tool for the central bank to use when interest rate changes are no longer possible or effective. With an independent central bank, that means that they, not the government, get to decide when helicopter money happens. In contrast, if your goal is to increase either public or private investment (or both) for a prolonged period, then its timing and amount should be something the government decides. While QE is hopefully going to be something that is unusual and rare, the goal of an investment bank is generally thought to be more long term, and not something that only happens in severe recessions.

For that reason, Corbyn’s QE looks like one of those ideas that is superficially attractive because it seems to kill two birds with one stone, but on reflection turns out to be a bad idea. If we want to keep an independent central bank we do not want the government putting the bank under pressure to do QE because the government wants more investment, and if that does not happen we do not want the central bank deciding whether extra investment happens. Indeed some of those who dislike the idea of helicopter money have already been using Corbyn’s QE to say ‘I told you helicopter money was a slippery slope that would lead to the end of central bank independence’.

However I think it is unfair and unproductive to leave it there. Suppose that a NIB is created, not on the back of QE but using more conventional forms of finance. (If the government wants to encourage it, just directly subsidise that finance with conventional borrowing. Don’t be put off doing so by deficit fetishism.) Suppose we also like the concept of helicopter money - not for now, but for the next time interest rates hit their lower bound and the central bank wants more stimulus. In those circumstances, it might well make sense for helicopter money to be used not only to send cheques to individuals, but also to bring forward investment financed by the NIB, or public sector investment financed directly by the state. If those investment projects could get off the ground quickly, and crucially would not have happened for some time otherwise, then what I have elsewhere described as ‘democratic helicopter money’ would make sense. [2] This is because investment that also boosts the supply side is likely to be a far more effective form of stimulus than cheques posted to individuals.

So one day, this form of Corbyn’s QE could happen. But we need to get the idea of helicopter money, and the need for public investment and a National Investment Bank, accepted in their own right first. Putting the two ideas together right now is misconceived, and is in danger of discrediting two potentially good ideas.

Original article with follow-up questions