‘Quantitative Easing for the People’ is one of the cornerstones of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership platform. The basic idea is simple: a hypothetical Corbyn government would instruct the Bank of England to create new electronic money (the modern equivalent of printing it) to fund public investment projects. The vehicle for doing this would be the ‘National Investment Bank’, which would be charged with funding public investment. The NIB would issue bonds that the BoE would be commanded to buy.
You can see what the architects inside Corbyn’s camp were thinking. They believe Labour lost the election because it was not seen to have a sound policy on the deficit. So, instead, they have based an anti-austerity policy on money-financing, not deficit financing. Simple! Why did we not think of this before, you can hear them muttering.
But almost everything about ‘QE for the people’ is silly — and it’s a telling insight into the bodged nature of the Corbyn insurgency.
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