People’s QE makes strange bedfellows: Jeremy Corbyn is not the first to pitch a quantitative easing for people
Labour's new hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn has proposed a range of ideas to transform Britain into an idyllic land of equality, where public sector workers happily whistle while they work and joyous children skip hand-in-hand through rainbows.
Some of these brainwaves have become known as “Corbynomics”, among which is a plan – coined The People’s QE and taken from tax blogger Richard Murphy – for the Bank of England to print money and splash it on infrastructure projects.
Murphy explains: “If QE funding was used to fund essential infrastructure improvements across the UK… that could increase employment [and] create new business opportunities”.
Sound familiar? Maybe not.
But then The Capitalist doubts you’re au fait with the British National Party’s manifesto from back in 2010, which had a section on QE.
“We would have employed at least a significant element of the new funding to create capital projects and investment in new infrastructure … which would also have created real jobs.”
Great minds, eh?