So far as I can tell, it looks like Mervyn King is on the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, which will be holding an enquiry into QE. A policy he instigated and guided, 2009-2013. I think he should recuse himself really.
Looking into QE questions loom like 'should central banks have done this at all?'. And 'How does this work and what effects will it have?' Both things he is certainly capable of being impartial about, but he has obvious vested interests in defending what he did and said.
It would be better to call him as a witness and grill him about his involvement in QE, rather than have him asking the questions and exerting influence behind the scenes on any HoL report.
A credible process wants to be above any suspicion that witnesses are steered away from topics that might cause the UK originator of QE embarrassment. I am sure MAK would play a straight bat here, but what is the point in risking people think you might not?
The BoE's own Independent Evaluation Office covered territory around how/why QE works, a topic that the profession hasn't settled yet, and one that has dogged communications of central banks about QE....
Eg on instigation, the BoE and MAK in particular stressed the continuity in QE - controlling the quantity of money, when before they controlled the price... and BoE educational material stressed 'injecting liquidity'...
This was actually exactly the channel thought to have little or no effect at the floor to rates. Perhaps unsurprisingly communications shifted towards the effect QE had on longer term yields via squeezing term and credit spreads.
MAK is hardly going to ask a question that elicits comment on this early transmission comprehension / communications flunk. And one can think of many othet examples that would put him in the awkward position of being the BoE rep on the wrong side of the table.
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The Tory/lockdown sceptic worry for kids' education during the lockdown stirs a voice inside my head 'what exactly were you arguing as the Coalition implemented its austerity plans that impacted on education spending?'
The concern from the same camp about this affecting poor kids most, and exaggerating educational inequality, makes me wonder what they think luxuriantly funded private schools all the time, pandemic or no, are doing. Is that level of educational inequality just about right?
Also not sure about what is being envisaged: allowing R to go >1 temporarily, expecting the vaccination program to subsequently suppress to <1, accepting the burst of deaths and incapacities in the meantime, hoping that the viral spread doesn't collapse schooling in the process?
Resistance should be pretty firm, not hysterical. It's based on the view that opening schools up means R goes back to being >1, and we start to lose control of the virus again, even at current levels of vaccinated people.
Vaccinating teachers, who are a small portion of number of people in a school, won't change that calculation enough.
Allowing the virus to get out of control again will generate deaths that are very hard to justify so close to the end; and increase the risk of more mutations that bring forward the date at which round two of the mutation race starts.
You might be tempted to dismiss the idea of setting up a Centre for Economics and Epidemiology, now the vaccine roll out is underway, and there seems light at the end of the tunnel.
Some of what it was for - providing transparent, expert advice on lockdown and suppression measures and economic policy through the pandemic - is now in the past.
Points that I did not make in this @prospect_uk piece on vaccine nationalism...
1. If you start playing the game fairly, and then you are on the end of some vaccine nationalism by foreigners [this is how some see the current situation], you have a choice about how to play from then on.
2. Do you revert to nationalism yourself [UK vaccines first], or turn the other cheek, hoping to shame the other party into cooperating?
The fuel injected Brexiter comments on the EU's vaccine problems miss many points.
1) no-one wanted to get out of the EU or the single market to protect ourselves better against a pandemic. See Brexit Tory controlled government policy 2016-2020 regarding the NHS and pandemic preparedness.
2) we could have, and, perhaps thanks to the need to genuflect to nationalists, or out of pragmatic needs, chosen to go our own way on procurement even within the EU.
1. IMO there is a very clear near-term benefit to not exporting vaccines. Fewer UK people die/left with long covid, travel restrictions excepted, life returns to normal faster.
2. The cost benefit analysis in the longer term is less clear cut; the EU could retalliate during the endless vaccine tweak and top-up phase. Or with other measures.
3. In general, vaccine nationalism - like any trade nationalism - is a bad thing. Cooperation better. Unvaccinated foreigners will infect us and incubate mutations that infect us and render our clung onto domestic vaccines obsolete faster.