From today's Guardian, from my Green New Deal colleague Colin Hines:
Mervyn King is right that the UK is looking over an economic abyss (Britain in grip of 'worst ever financial crisis', 7 October), but giving greedy, tight-fisted banks a further £75bn in the hope that this time they will lend enough to business is a fantasy. Quantitative easing should instead have been used to increase economic activity and hence jobs and business opportunities. Without that, who is going to want to borrow when for many businesses the real crisis is increasingly a shortage of sales and not a shortage of capital.
The Bank of England could have started to tackle this demand deficit, had it used a substantial percentage of the £75bn to finance a green new deal to make all UK buildings energy efficient. This would have helped kickstart the economy by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs where people actually live. King admits he will probably need a QE3, but to be third-time lucky he should make it a green QE3. It could even be nicknamed plan B.
Colin Hines
Convenor, Green New Deal Group
Full details of Green Quantitative Easing here.
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But green QE would benefit ordinary people other than just the banks and the financial institutions. And that would never do, would it?
Meanwhile the Institute for Fiscal Studies forecasts that two years “dominated by a large decline” in incomes will push another 600,000 children into poverty.
The IFS says that in 2010, 2.5 million children and 2.1 million working-age parents were living in “absolute” poverty. By 2013, it predicts the number of children in absolute poverty will peak at 3.1 million, along with 2.5 million working-age parents and four million working-age adults without children.
And the UK claims to be a civilised country — that is until the bankers took over our society and government.