It’s a pleasure to be speaking today at the University of Birmingham, and an honour to be doing so at the third Peter Sinclair Town Hall lecture. My focus today is on quantitative easing – QE for short – and its use as an economic policy tool. The Bank of England’s internal Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) published its own evaluation of QE earlier this year, where it noted that “there remain open debates about how QE works in different states of the world, its broader interlinkages and its potential limitations”.1 What I want to use my lecture for today is to set out my own views on QE as a policy tool, as well ... (full story)