QE no longer the “last resort of desperate governments”?
When the Bank of England was considering quantitative easing back in early 2009, George Osborne, then shadow chancellor, lambasted it as the “last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.”
A general election later and, unsurprisingly, Mr Osborne is a little less critical. This from today’s letter to Sir Mervyn King: 
ECB holds
The European Central Bank has held its main refinancing rate at 1.5 per cent, as expected.
We’ll be live blogging on Jean-Claude Trichet’s press conference, which begins at 13.30 London time, on The World blog. Mr Trichet is expected to announce more liquidity support for eurozone banks then. Read more
QE2 ahoy!
The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee just has backed more asset purchases.
It will buy £75bn-worth of bonds, taking its total stock of asset purchases to £275bn. Read more
Sir Mervyn King secured a decisive victory over the Treasury this week when the latter finally took on the task of credit easing. For the governor of the Bank of England – better placed to do the job, but adamant that this would taint the Bank’s independence – it was a triumph of bureaucratic precision over pragmatism; and of order over action. Britain will not thank him for it if institutional purity comes at the cost of jobs and corporate financing.
The Treasury disguised its surrender: chancellor George Osborne won plaudits from the Conservative party faithful for pledging to bring forward plans to ease the flow of credit to small- and medium-sized companies. But the proper reaction to his words would have been one of bemusement.
Credit easing is far from a new policy lever. It was first announced by Alistair Darling, Mr Osborne’s predecessor, on January 19 2009 and clarified in an exchange of letters between the governor and the then chancellor later that month.
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
