Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the shrewd financial columnist for Britain’s conservative Daily Telegraph, hates everything about Corbynomics except for the new Labour leader’s proposal for a "People’s Quantitative Easing (QE)" programme.
"To be clear, Mr Corbyn's economic vision is not my cup of tea. His claim that £93bn can be bled each year from business by cutting tax relief and subsidies is preposterous, and if he has any sense he will soon toss these wild proposals into the dustbin… a wholesale attack on swathes of industry and the City of London would be futile”, he writes. But “while there are many good reasons to gasp at Jeremy’s Corbyn’s planned assault on capital…his enthusiasm for ‘People’s QE’ is not one of them”. Corbyn’s economic advisors would instruct the Bank of England to redirect its bond buying program away from sovereign and corporate bond issuers and towards the wholesale purchase of those issued by housing authorities, local councils, and green investment banks. The mountains of cash supplied to these entities would be used to build houses, schools, and hospitals and to support clean energy initiatives and other public needs. Evans-Prtichard’s endorsement of the program reflects the increasing frustration within elite circles about the failure of conventional QE to boost the anemic economic growth of the advanced capitalist countries since the financial crisis of 2007-08. Instead, the massive bond buying by central banks has contributed mostly to non-productive speculation in stocks and real estate by banks, corporations, and wealthy individuals, coupled with growing economic inequality and mass political discontent. Corbyn’s idea of a People’s QE not only has a long pedigree on the left - traceable to New Deal economist Abba Lerner and more recently the left Keynesian Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) school - but has also been recommended as a monetary policy of last resort by conservative economists like Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke who likened the scheme to dropping money by helicopter when more conventional methods of boosting mass purchasing power have failed. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11869701/Jeremy-Corbyns-QE-for-the-people-is-exactly-what-the-world-may-soon-need.html _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
