Capitalism Mislabelled
Q117 Ms Keeble: What makes it worse is that the one tool that the MPC has is interest rates and that filters through to our constituents in the form of higher mortgages. That makes them complain even more; it becomes cyclical.Lord George: Yes, if house prices are going up. But one has to step back and recognise – I referred to it earlier – that when we were in an environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of the decade it meant that external demand was declining. Related to that, business investment was declining. One had only two alternatives in sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward: one was public spending and the other was consumption. It is true that taxation and public spending can influence the demand climate and consumer spending, but confronted with what we saw we knew that we had to stimulate consumer spending. We knew that we had pushed it up to levels that could not possibly be sustained in the medium and longer term, but for the time being if we had not done that the UK economy would have gone into recession, just like the economies of the United States, Germany and other major industrial countries. That pushed up house prices and increased household debt. That problem has been a legacy to my successors; they have to sort it out, but we really did not have much of a choice about what we did unless we accepted that we would yank it back or give up stability altogether. That is the point I am trying to make in answer to Mr Newmark. There are some people – maybe lots – who say that house prices is the biggest problem, that the mortgage rate is going up, housing is not affordable and so on.
Q41 Mark Garnier: ...If you thought that QE was creating financial instability, would you try to warn the MPC and, if so, how would you do it?Andrew Haldane: I absolutely see it as my one of jobs as an FPC member to alert not just the MPC but this Committee and the wider world if I thought that QE, or monetary policy actions more broadly, was posing significant risks to UK financial system stability...To the substance, this is a risk that I feel very acutely right now. If I were to single out what for me would be the biggest risk to global financial stability right now it would be a disorderly reversion in the yields of government bonds globally, for any one of a variety of reasons. We have seen shades of that over the last two or three weeks. Let's be clear, we have intentionally blown the biggest government bond bubble in history. That is where we are, so we need to be vigilant to the consequences of that bubble deflating more quickly than we might otherwise have wanted. That is a risk. It is one we as [Financial Policy Committee] need to be very vigilant to.