The Economy the Rich Won

The two-part BBC documentary, The Decade the Rich Won, which concluded last week, made for interesting viewing. It told “the little understood story of our times” – how through the policy of Quantitative Easing (QE), the fabulously wealthy became even more fabulously wealthy and the rest of us had to make do with austerity and falling wages. But it did beg certain questions:

Why didn’t anyone say so at the time? “Full disclosure” said hedge fund manager Paul Marshall. Since the 2008 crash the world’s largest central banks (US Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank and Bank of Japan) have created around $20 trillion which has basically gone into the already cavernous pockets of banks and wealthy individuals (like Paul Marshall’s).

In the words of Andrew Huszar, who was QE Program Manager at the Federal Reserve (and thus in charge of the entire process): “over the last 12 years, we’re talking about unprecedented amounts of money being printed and funnelled into the markets, banks being showered with trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars, ultimately benefiting the most privileged in our societies.” Only a fraction of the ‘stimulus’ he admits, “was actually getting out and making a difference in the lives of everyday people”.

But these mea culpas are strictly retroactive. When QE was first happening, not only politicians and central bankers – who you might expect to parrot the official line – but also media organisations like the BBC uncritically rehearsed the story that QE was providing  a lifeline to the ‘real economy’.  In 2009, the BBC likened QE to putting “imaginary petrol” in your car. 

And this isn’t of purely historical interest. The Covid shut down saw governments quickly turn to the “unconventional” (now used so much it must be thoroughly conventional) technique of QE. In Britain, the Bank of England increased QE from £495 billion to £895 billion. And the BBC was on hand to explain how this pumping of money into the economy would “help it to recover”.

So much like a war, when the controversy in question has to be implemented unscathed, critical voices are sidelined. But in the aftermath, when it doesn’t much matter anymore, they are allowed airtime and what actually went on can be safely revealed. That’s how much freedom we’re allowed.

If the economy wasn’t saved, what was? All the old familiar faces protested that they had no choice but to implement QE. It was a no brainer. “We kept the economy going,” said Alastair Darling (Chancellor in 2008). “People who’d otherwise have lost their jobs didn’t”. Former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King attested that the first tranche of QE prevented a re-run of the Great Depression. Transient Tory PM Theresa May called QE “emergency medicine”.

But if only a small amount of the QE trillions actually escaped into the ‘real economy’ – in the US mortgage lending actually went down after QE was introduced – it can’t have been the actual economy, the economy of people exchanging goods and services, that was saved. The “emergency medicine” has to have been for the conduit through which QE was implemented, the financial system. And only by QE preventing the implosion of the financial system, was the real economy rescued from oblivion.

The real question is therefore how did QE save the financial system? This is something the documentary didn’t try to explain but is actually the crux of the whole story. One means was simply by pumping huge amounts of money into the system. Thus hugely indebted banks and other companies escaped their natural free market fate.

But QE did more than supplying, in Huszar’s words, “the greatest Wall Street bailout of all time”. It also works by ensuring an ultra-low interest rate and by increasing the price and reducing the yield on government bonds, incentivising investors to shift into other assets, such as shares.

In this way, zombie companies – firms that do nothing more than survive by meeting the interest payments on their debt and paying wages – are permitted to live on. And the stock market as a whole receives a purely artificial boost. Under ‘normal’ market conditions, shares prices reflect investors’ expectations that profits will be high or low in the future. But not under QE. Thus a company such as car rental firm Hertz can file for bankruptcy and see its share price soar at the same time.

This is nothing like a free market system. More accurately it should be called a state capitalist system.

You can’t artificially hold down energy prices but you can, apparently, artificially raise share prices. Ex-banker and hedge fund manager Rishi Sunak lectured us last week on the futility of the state trying to hold down the natural, market prices of gas and electricity. But strangely this King Canute style impotence does not apply to share prices – or house prices – which through QE can be synthetically raised for years.

But what happens, you might wonder, when this outside ‘stimulus’ is taken away? When “the shot of adrenalin”– in Alastair Darling’s phrase – has done its work and we can get back to normal.  Will there be a massive market correction towards ‘natural’ share prices, precipitating widespread company bankruptcies? In 2018, US Federal Reserve started selling the bonds it had acquired under QE – a practice called Quantitative Tightening – but it had to abandon the policy after a few months owing to a negative reaction from markets.

In Britain, authorities have reached for the “unconventional” policy of QE on three separate occasions in the last decade. Currently central banks around the world are reducing the amount of QE but not stopping it altogether or reversing it which should happen under a free market system.

The documentary only nibbled at this question. “In a way markets are addicted”, said hedge funder Marshall, “and central banks have become very nervous indeed about removing the drug.”

But if QE has become a near permanent part of the economic landscape what are the consequences? Does its very existence – and the huge amount of money involved – mean that it is always accompanied by the shadow of austerity?

Or can QE be redirected to pay for essential public services like the NHS? If you can save the financial system by injecting huge amounts of money why can’t you do the same for public services millions of people depend on? This is essentially the argument of Modern Monetary Theory – that public services can be fully funded through nothing more elaborate than hitting keys on a computer. The need to amass taxpayer funds to pay for everything is a myth. Austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity. The only constraint – MMTers argue – is inflation.

However, lack of inflation is the one sure sign that QE didn’t diffuse through the real economy, rather staying within the financial system. The classic explanation of inflation is that it is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. And the simple fact that inflation didn’t rise exponentially is a pretty strong indication that the QE trillions didn’t filter through the financial system. Inflation is rising now unquestionably, probably caused by supply chain disruptions and Covid relief spending. The Bank of England predicts it will hit 7.25% in the spring. But this is not the level of inflation that QE, if the theory is right, should generate.

However, if QE is redirected to pay for public services, all the ingredients for spiralling inflation are there. This is because the money in its entirety will enter the real economy – through spending by consumers and suppliers. And the mere existence of more money, if accompanied by rising prices, does not translate into greater value or purchasing power.

It’s also the case that QE, notwithstanding the public pronouncements, is intended to have financial effects. Through buying bonds from banks and other companies, these institutions are suddenly awash with cash which they will inevitably use to buy assets, such as shares, thus inflating their price. It is also meant to reduce interest rates on debt for vastly overleveraged companies. QE “for the people” cannot, I would suggest, use the same conduits without having similar effects which pointedly don’t benefit the people.

But the establishment’s faith in QE is unshaken. The BBC doc did reveal a certain buyer’s remorse on the part of some. Ex-Bank of England governor Mervyn King admitted, “if you’ve had the biggest monetary policy stimulus the world has ever seen and you still haven’t had adequate economic growth, maybe the answer is not yet more monetary policy stimulus.”

But there no indication that those at the helm would, in retrospect, have done anything different or, indeed, would do anything different today. Even in conditions resembling 1970s’ “stagflation” – negligible economic growth and rising inflation – alternative means of stimulus are not seriously entertained. “Helicopter Money”, for example, the crediting of ordinary people’s bank accounts with cash in the expectation they will spend it, contravenes a core principle of our political settlement, that only the financial system deserves bailing out and everyone else – especially the bottom 30% — must be kept on a firm leash.

The QE/Austerity duopoly thus reigns supreme and is, if anything, more entrenched than ever given that it is longer a leap in the dark but tried and tested policy. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, for example, hails from the finance system and has faithfully imbued its self-interested mores. The personally very wealthy Rishi Sunak used to work for Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund – the precise ‘sector’ of the economy that Paul Marshall says has “made out like bandits” because of QE.

And if that isn’t guarantee enough, Sunak’s opposite number – Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves – used to work for the Bank of England and is an expert – mercifully! – on QE.

So despite the enormous pile of evidence that QE just makes the rich richer and has no impact on economic growth, the establishment faith in the practice remains undimmed. The bandits have taken over the asylum.

QE’s impact on inequality is astonishing. A statistic flashed on the screen at the end of the documentary revealed just how well the bandits have done. UK billionaires (individuals who own assets of more than a thousand million pounds) are worth 310% more than in 2010. But the effect is not limited to this blessed island. According to rich peoples’ magazine Forbes, in 2021 there were 2,755 billionaires in the world, an increase of 660 from just a year earlier. “Altogether these billionaires are worth $13.1 trillion, up from $8 trillion in 2020,” says Forbes. In 2006 – just two years before the QE era began in Euro-America – there were less than 1,000 billionaires globally with a collective net worth of under $3 trillion. What explains the huge increase in a period of insipid economic growth?

Objecting to this is not just a case of the “politics of envy” as it used to be derided. Beside the fact that these individuals do not deserve their loot under any objective free market criteria, such mammoth inequality fundamentally distorts society. As I have argued in a previous post, these billions are not all spent on buying luxury yachts or even blasting into space. They are also used as capital – money invested to make more money. In areas such as housing, privatisation, fossil fuel extraction, the media and democracy the invested funds of the ultra-rich are perverting society in ways that are directly at odds with the interests and desires of the vast majority. And through QE we have, through government action, turbocharged this process.

But then that is not all that surprising as the ultra-rich basically own the government as well.