Cast your mind back a couple of years. The government decides much of the country’s businesses need to cease trading, and the vast majority of individuals must be confined to their homes, for an indefinite period of time. They borrow hundreds of billions of pounds to make this happen.
The Bank of England, which is supposedly independent from government, helps them in this endeavour by purchasing £300 billion worth of government bonds and keeping interest rates practically at zero. This is unanimously supported by all the major opposition parties, whose complaint is only that they think the government should go further. After all, received opinion holds that a “V-shaped” recovery is certain. Apparently, governments can put entire economies into a freeze, and then simply defrost them like nothing’s happened….
