Impoverishing savers has been a price worth paying for rescuing the economy – so runs the official justification for the Bank of England's money-printing programme.
But it turns out that the benefits of printing all that new money may have been negligible. According to a new study by two senior US economists, America's second programme of quantitative easing, nicknamed "QE2", boosted economic output by just 0.04pc.
Simply telling the markets that interest rates would remain low was more effective, adding 0.09pc to growth, said Vasco Curdia, senior economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, and Andrea Ferrero, his opposite number at the New York Fed. Read on and comment » | Richard Evans | Tuesday, August 13, 2013
