Well, Quantitative Easing is back, the terrifying new euphemism for ‘printing money’, which is itself a euphemism for stealing.

“Quantitative Easing” suggests that it’s ‘easing’ the pressure on the ‘quantity’ of money. This is not what is actually happening. Things wot Quantitative Easing doesn’t do:

1) It doesn’t pump money into the economy

2) It doesn’t create wealth from thin air

“But wait,” you cry. “The BBC says it’s pumping money into the economy! Why the hell would I trust you over the BBC?”

It’s a very sensible question to ask, but I contend that the BBC is dead wrong on this.

When money is printed it doesn’t create new money. It devalues all the rest of the money in the economy. In other words, the difference between the Government raising £200,000,000,000 by knocking on our doors and taking, on average, £6,666 from each adult of working age on one hand, and printing £200,000,000,000 on the other is that you don’t realise you’ve been robbed with the latter.

You’ve have been robbed. We all have. You just haven’t noticed yet.

By ‘pump money into the economy’ they really mean they’re pumping even more of our money into the banks. This money of ours, taken out of our hands by a simple key-press on a computer, is being used to convert bank’s investments into cash, leaving us, the taxpayer, holding the nightmare ‘assets’ that caused the credit crunch in the first place.

It’s hard to imagine any situation in which the taxpayer could possibly have been more screwed than they have been.

Yet all this Quantitative Easing doesn’t grow the economy at all. Not one bit. All that’s happened is that wealth has been redistributed from everyone to the banks. The total amount of wealth is exactly the same as it was before, but the value of a pound has gone down. We’re all, relative to the rest of the world, a third poorer than we were at the start of the credit crunch.

The theory is that by dumping massive volumes of cash on the banks they will start lending to us again, and thus get the economy going – specifically the hope is that banks with money can generate wealth simply by lending money. That’s the gamble.

So far it doesn’t appear to have had any effect. They have no clue, in fact, what it’s doing or what it’s likely to do. It may – just may – be keeping us in inflation as opposed to deflation. Yet despite this uncertainty they’re still confiscating another £25,000,000,000 in wealth from the economy to redistribute to the banks.

Good thing it’s bonfire night. I need to blow stuff up.