There’s a strange phenomenon in Britain. The FTSE is at an all-time high, the rich are richer than ever, yet we’ve had almost no real growth in nearly twenty years. Some say that’s just capitalism doing what capitalism does, the parasitic rich sucking the life out of the country while they sit in their country piles gorging on the remains of some kidnapped peasants. Alright, maybe that’s taking it a bit far, but you get the point. I’d like to suggest another explanation, not simple greed, but a series of well-intentioned errors made in the scramble to restart the economy after the financial crash of 2008.
The Crash
First, let’s set the scene. The crisis began with a housing bubble in the United States. During a period of ultra-low interest rates, banks gave mortgages to people who couldn’t really afford them, pushing house prices higher and higher. Then someone had the bright idea to bundle these risky loans together and sell the debt to other financial institutions. These became known as Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), and they seemed like a clever way to make easy money, until interest rates rose and borrowers began to default. That forced a wave of foreclosures, flooding the market with homes and exposing the fact that banks were sitting on piles of worthless debt. Panic followed, trust evaporated, and the financial system collapsed.
Panic on the streets of Everywhere
The panic spread across the world, and many UK banks were deeply exposed to the bad debt coming out of the US market (because everyone loves easy money, right?). Suddenly, our own financial institutions realised their balance sheets were full of junk. Cue more panic, and a total freeze in the financial markets, money basically stopped moving.
Credit dried up overnight, not just between banks, but for small businesses and ordinary borrowers too. Mortgages disappeared almost entirely, and with no one able to buy, house prices collapsed, leaving many in negative equity. Unemployment rose rapidly, reaching a peak of around 8.5% in 2011, and the stock market fell by nearly 40%, wiping billions from pensions and savings. One by one, banks began to buckle under the weight of bad debt, and the panic deepened.
Enter our hero, QE
The panic spread to the government and Bank of England (BoE) – only granted independence from the British state in 1997 – which, desperate to find a way out of this, started slashing interest rates in the hope that cheap borrowing would encourage spending, but it didn’t. Confidence was at rock bottom, both in the consumer realm and the markets. Welcome our friend QE, or Quantitative Easing.
Essentially QE is printing money (of course! Why didn’t we think of that earlier?!). The idea is that the state (or in this case the BoE, with the government’s blessing) injected huge amounts of liquidity into the system to stimulate demand: more money in the system, more spending, problem solved.
Er… no.
A Lesson from Japan
A quick look back a few years. QE was, until 2001, just an economic theory, discussed by monetary nerds, then it was tried in Japan after their own collapse. It wasn’t a total disaster, but it wasn’t a massive success either. It avoided complete collapse, but the money stayed in the banking system because confidence was at absolute zero in the economy. Sound familiar? Out of ideas, the UK government thought that they would try it.
In 2009, the Treasury, led by Alistair Darling, gave its approval and created a special vehicle called the Asset Purchase Facility, which was the vehicle used to drive this injection of liquidity.
Bonds and Gilts
Now, it’s worth pausing here just to explain how this normally works. When the government wants to raise money (hopefully for infrastructure projects, or major investment in the country, not to pay for its weekly shop), it sells government bonds, or gilts (the old “gilt-edged securities,” named after the gold-trimmed paper certificates that signified rock-solid safety) to banks, pension funds and investors. They buy them because gilts are considered ultra-safe, and they receive interest in return. Money flows from investors to the government, which then spends it into the economy. Simple enough, but QE turned that logic on its head. Instead of investors buying new bonds, the Bank of England started buying existing ones from them. It paid with newly created electronic money, credited straight into the banks’ reserve accounts. The idea was that banks and investors, now flush with cash, would start lending and investing in the real economy.
So we’re absolutely crystal clear:
Normally, money already existing in the system is essentially loaned to the government to spend in the economy, then paid back.
This time, the BoE magicked huge sums of money out of thin air to buy bonds from the banks and investors (pension funds and commercial institutions).
The wheels in motion
QE began in early 2009, at the height of the panic, with the Bank creating an initial £75 billion to buy gilts. Over the next few years, it expanded again and again, £200 billion by the end of 2009, £375 billion by 2012, and eventually almost £900 billion after Covid in 2021. Just to put that into context: £900 billion is more than the entire yearly output (GDP) of Switzerland in 2024. This money got into the world not through productivity, building infrastructure, or growth, but someone typing it in on a keyboard.
On paper, it worked. The markets calmed, banks stopped panicking, and Britain avoided a full-scale depression, but the money never really reached the people it was supposed to help. It stayed in the financial system, moving between banks, investment funds, and corporate balance sheets. As gilt yields fell, investors rebalanced into equities, property and credit. That lifted asset prices, but it didn’t reliably translate into new productive investment. The money markets still had to make money – that’s their whole purpose – so investors went looking for better returns elsewhere. Asset prices soared, interest rates sank even lower, and the rich, who already owned most of the assets, watched their wealth multiply. Savers were punished with ultra-low interest rates and everyone else was told the system had been saved.
Early reports in 2011 described QE as a success, largely because the Bank of England said it was. The press had little independent data to go on, and the policy itself was so new and technical that most coverage simply reflected the Bank’s own assessments. In hindsight, those articles captured how opaque the policy really was: the public was told it had worked, but very few people could say exactly what that meant.
Reality bites
Out in the real world, things weren’t going to plan. The money had entered the system, but it wasn’t coming back out again. Banks couldn’t (or wouldn’t) lend. Demand for loans was weak; no one was in the mood to take risks. New regulations forced banks to hold more capital on their balance sheets, so the extra cash created by QE neatly filled that requirement. In other words, it was safer for them to keep it; yields fell, and money chased risk inside the system. Although cheaper mortgages and corporate borrowing (through lower central interest rates) did allow some of it out, it didn’t have the desired effect of driving the economy forward.
Austerity plus QE
While the Bank of England was printing hundreds of billions to keep the financial system afloat, the government was busy taking money out of the real economy. Under George Osborne’s “age of austerity,” public spending was cut in the name of restoring confidence and reducing the deficit (someone may be trying this again soon). The idea was that if the state tightened its belt, the private sector would take the slack and growth would return. It didn’t. QE inflated the price of financial assets, enriching those who already had capital, while austerity drained demand from the parts of the economy that relied on wages and public investment. Councils sold off parks, libraries and social housing; infrastructure projects stalled; wages in the public sector froze. The result was a country running two economies at once, one buoyed by cheap money, the other starved of it. Austerity made QE’s distortions worse: it deepened inequality, slowed productivity, and convinced millions that the system worked for everyone except them.
The haves and the have-nots
Before moving on to the legacy of this policy, it’s worth looking a little closer at what it really did to wealth. It’s easy to mistake this for greed or conspiracy – the rich got richer and everyone else fell behind – but there was no conspiracy. You could argue there was incompetence, a lack of foresight, maybe even panic. What there wasn’t was malice. These were people trying, in good faith, to use the tools they had to stop a catastrophe. It wasn’t an evil plan; it was an accident of design that ended up enriching the very institutions that caused the crash.
In recovery?
By 2013 the crisis had passed, the financial cogs were moving again, and we were getting on with life, but the government had found a quick fix that seemed so easy.
QE had made the economy look stable, stock markets recovered, house prices recovered, and unemployment went down to 4% by 2016. The image and the reality underneath were, again, very different. As we’ve already discussed, the markets – housing and stock – recovered through asset inflation (and, although the analysis is too much for this essay, housing prices increased, were bought by wealthy people including foreign investors, and put huge downward pressure on the general public).
Employment rebounded surprisingly quickly, but it was a recovery built on under-employment and weak bargaining power. People had jobs, but many of those jobs didn’t pay enough to live on or came without security or benefits. Although it’s hard to separate cause from coincidence – stagnant wages had as much to do with weak productivity, globalisation, and austerity as with QE itself – the effect of easy money was to exaggerate the divide. Employers, still cautious after the crash, offered flexibility on their own terms like short contracts, gig work, self-employment. And with unions weakened and living costs rising, few workers had the leverage to demand more. It was full employment in name, but not in substance. That cheap corporate borrowing allowed some companies to become zombies; not productive, but with enough liquidity to survive.
GDP began climbing again by 2010, giving the appearance of recovery. Successive governments pointed to it as proof that their policies were working. But, as I have already explained, GDP only measures total output, not who benefits or how that growth is created. A country can get richer on paper while its people get poorer, and after 2008, that’s exactly what happened. At the end of 2016 we’d already pumped £435 billion into the economy, making the state’s balance sheet look healthier than it should be.
This is where the government’s addiction problem really begins to show: the data seemed to mean there was no need to fix the underlying causes of the country’s malaise. The numbers didn’t lie; everything looked rosy.
Relapse? Or perhaps we never recovered
Underneath the surface, things were getting worse. Productivity (the measure of how much value each hour of work produces) barely moved for more than a decade. Cheap money kept weak firms alive, low wages made hiring easier than investing (the same work gets done by more people, but the cost is still roughly the same), and austerity stripped away the foundations of long-term growth. Britain had full employment, but it wasn’t getting any better at what it did.
From 1970 to 2007, productivity grew at around 2% per year on average. From 2008 to 2016, it grew at roughly 0.2% per year, effectively flat. By 2016, the economy was producing about 20% less output per hour than it would have if pre-crash trends had continued. Economists literally called it “the productivity puzzle.”
Pulling the ladder up
So, to the housing market. Rising property values became the substitute for genuine economic progress. People felt richer, not because they earned more or produced more, but because the same home they’d lived in for ten years was suddenly worth twice as much. Having a house made all the difference. Those with houses saw their wealth increase and, through remortgaging and equity release, were able to fund their lifestyles with cheap credit, while those without saw the chance of home ownership and standards of living fall quickly.
This was never real wealth in the productive sense, it was paper wealth, dependent on confidence, low interest rates, and the belief that prices would always keep rising. Yet it became the emotional anchor of the recovery. Governments pointed to rising house prices as proof of success; homeowners took comfort in the growing value of their assets; banks were delighted to lend against them. The country’s sense of wellbeing was not being rebuilt on wages or innovation, but on property valuations.
The gap between the asset-rich and asset-poor widened every year. Renters saw their costs rise faster than their incomes; young people found the idea of ownership moving further out of reach. It’s worth noting this wasn’t purely a British phenomenon, but our dependence on property magnified it more than anywhere else. Foreign investors and buy-to-let landlords poured in (most dramatically in the South East and London), treating homes as safe stores of capital rather than places to live. By the mid-2010s, Britain had turned housing into a financial product, and stability itself became a market strategy.
In the short term, it worked. Rising house prices made consumers more confident and more willing to spend. Equity release and cheap credit filled the gap left by weak wages. Households extended themselves again, borrowing against inflated assets to maintain living standards that the real economy could no longer sustain. Britain looked prosperous, but the foundations were hollow.
It’s easy to see why politicians embraced this illusion. Rising house prices make voters (well, those with houses) happy and balance sheets look healthy. But beneath the surface, this form of prosperity was deeply corrosive. It tied national confidence to an unsustainable asset market and discouraged investment in the things that actually make a country stronger: skills, productivity, and innovation. It built resentment between the haves and the have-nots and sowed the seeds for the incredible levels of distrust in our governing class. QE had stabilised the crisis, but it also taught the political class that they could paper over the cracks and claim growth.
A growing distrust
By the mid-2010s, Britain looked calm and stable. Unemployment was low, inflation steady, and GDP growing just enough to reassure the headlines, but for most people, life didn’t feel like a recovery. Wages had barely moved in real terms since the crash, household debt was creeping up again, and public services were being cut under the banner of “austerity.” The numbers said the economy was fixed, yet daily experience said otherwise. As Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying, “If the data and the anecdotes don’t match, the data are probably wrong.” That gap, between the official story of recovery and the lived reality of stagnation, began to erode trust in the people running the system. Before we’d invented the term ‘gaslighting’ this is what was being done. Just to be clear, none of this is the single cause for anything that follows, but QE-era economics made the divide between the official line and the reality unbridgeable.
The B that must not be named
There is definitely not enough time here to go deep into the B word, and the roots ran far deeper than the world that QE had built, but the post-crash world shaped how both sides felt about the state of Britain. The issues of that era – rising asset prices, stagnant wages, and a system that seemed to work only for the well-connected – amplified frustration across the political spectrum.
For Leave voters, that frustration translated into anger at a political and economic elite that seemed detached from reality. They saw a “recovery” that lifted London bankers and property owners while towns across the North and Midlands were hollowed out. To them, Brexit wasn’t just about sovereignty or Brussels; it was a rejection of an economic order that claimed success while their wages, services, and prospects flatlined. QE made it look as if prosperity was possible, just not for them, another hit that soothed the markets but did nothing for the streets. The referendum became a chance to say no to a decade of stagnation.
For Remain voters, the same decade bred a quieter but equally corrosive cynicism. Many saw Brexit as madness, the final proof that populism had overwhelmed reason, but few genuinely believed the status quo was working either. The people warning about the chaos of leaving were often the same ones who had presided over wage suppression and asset inflation. QE had eroded faith in the competence of authority itself. Even among those who voted to stay, there was a weary sense that the system was already broken, that the prosperity being defended was, at best, a mirage.
Brexit’s going to hurt… Or is it?
As the UK woke up with a massive hangover on June 24th, 2016, the shocks of the referendum were beginning to build. The markets and the pound saw huge losses, and the thought of going cold turkey was just too much for the British government.
The post-referendum panic was short-lived. Within weeks, the Bank of England stepped in again, announcing another £60 billion in gilt purchases and a new corporate bond scheme to steady the markets. It worked. Sterling stopped falling, the FTSE rebounded, and the headlines soon declared that Britain had “defied the doom-mongers.”
In the short term, QE after Brexit kept the economy calm and confidence intact. But by cushioning the blow, it stopped Brexit from being Brexit. The shock that might have forced Britain to face its weaknesses – its dependence on cheap money, low wages, and imported labour – was smoothed away. Instead of disruption, we got more of the same. QE dulled the pain, but it also removed the possibility of change.
And, just like before, the money found its way back into the same places. Asset prices surged again, property climbed, and cheap credit flowed freely. The gap between London and everywhere else kept on growing, matched only in size by the resentment that went along with it. Leave voters saw the establishment rescuing itself yet again. Remain voters saw an economy so fragile it couldn’t survive a democratic decision without another injection from the central bank. The divide deepened, not because of Brexit itself, but because the crash that should have followed never came.
A calm, of sorts
As I’m writing this from 2025, this isn’t a spoiler, there’s another massive shock on the way and I’m guessing you won’t need a degree from the LSE to figure out what we’re going to do about it.
In the intervening years we just bumbled along, stock markets continued to grow, house prices also, but the economy? Productivity? Hope? Nope. All the while the government was still pointing to GDP and insisting life is rosy because the books say so. A few times the BoE thought that perhaps it was time to get sober, but the markets, like the friend who says they want you to get clean but is as addicted as you are, kept us drunk and docile.
Pandemic on the streets of Everywhere
When Covid hit in 2020 it wasn’t just the money markets that stopped moving, the entire world did. It was the biggest shock in modern British history, dwarfing the 2008 crash. Within weeks, GDP collapsed by 20%, millions were furloughed, but the British government didn’t need to worry, we could just drink our way through it.
The Treasury announced the furlough scheme, essentially a blank cheque to keep pay packets flowing and create an illusion of normality, the BoE expanded its balance sheet by £450 billion, bigger than all of the previous rounds of QE combined, by far the biggest monetary intervention ever in Britain.
Again, it worked, in the narrowest sense. Markets steadied, bond yields sank, and the FTSE began to climb again. The state effectively nationalised private income, wages, rent holidays, loan guarantees, and then used QE to make it all look sustainable. The furlough scheme stopped mass unemployment; QE stopped the debt markets from imploding. Britain had managed to press pause on capitalism without letting it collapse.
As predictable as the sun rising, the same pattern repeated, only turbo-charged this time: liquidity surged into financial assets, property prices soared to record highs, and those who already owned the most came out of lockdown richer than ever. Savers and renters, again, were left behind.
By 2021, as the rest of life tried to resume, the balance sheet told the real story. The Bank of England now owned almost 40% of all UK government debt, and the line between fiscal and monetary policy had effectively disappeared, despite being made independent only 24 years before. The BoE was part of the state apparatus again, one hand writing cheques that the other cashed. QE was no longer a tool to help out in a crisis; it was the system, or, if you look at it another way, it was still a tool to help out in a crisis, but the crisis was permanent and self-inflicted.
The Comedown – Inflation and Reality Bites Back
After going on the biggest bender we’d ever been on, we woke with a monster hangover. For more than a decade, we’d been convinced that the laws of economics had changed, that you could pour nearly a trillion pounds down your neck without consequence because inflation never seemed to rise. But that wasn’t magic, it was dormancy. The money was there all along, sloshing around in asset markets and bank reserves, not wages or goods.
Covid was that one drink too many. Supply chains froze, shops shut, and people stuck at home started spending our free money on whatever they could still buy. Demand stayed high while supply collapsed and, for the first time, all that magic money met real scarcity. The result was predictable: inflation roared back, peaking at more than 11 percent in 2022, the highest in forty years.
Politicians blamed Putin, energy companies, profiteers, and of course Brexit, anyone but themselves. To be clear, the war in Ukraine and energy shocks played their part, but the ground had already been laid by a decade of artificial demand, zombie companies, and a housing market bloated on cheap debt and money with nowhere to go. We’d built an economy that only functioned under these artificial conditions, but reality hit and we had an inevitable bill to pay.
Prices soared; wages (still) didn’t. Mortgage rates jumped, rents followed, and suddenly the paper wealth of the QE years showed itself for what it was, a trap. For years, the Bank of England had insisted that inflation was “transitory.” In truth, it was structural, the inevitable bill for the years we’d spent pretending that money was free and growth could be borrowed.
Rock bottom – the realisation dawns
By 2023 the hangover had turned into a full-blown reckoning. Interest rates, which had been near zero for more than a decade, shot up faster than at any time since the 1980s. Households and businesses that had built their lives on cheap credit suddenly faced reality: the entire economy had been priced for free money. The government’s debt servicing costs exploded, mortgage holders saw repayments double, and companies that had survived for years on rolling loans quietly went under.
The country began to discover just how dependent it had become on a drug it didn’t even know it was taking (and, by the very fact I’m writing this, in large parts, still doesn’t). For years, the political class had treated low rates and central-bank intervention as the natural order of things, oblivious to the fact that it would ever stop.
Quantitative Tightening, the process of selling back the assets the Bank of England had spent years buying, was supposed to mark the return to normality. But there was no normal to return to. The Bank couldn’t shrink its balance sheet without spooking the markets, and every wobble in the gilt market reminded ministers that their stability depended on the very institution meant to be independent from them. In effect, one arm of the state was issuing debt while another was absorbing it. The supposed guardrail of monetary discipline had become a feedback loop of political survival.
For households, the story was simpler and crueller. Energy prices, food prices, rents - all rising. Wages lagging behind. Savings eroded; years of 0% interest had already done the damage, and inflation finished the job. The wealth effect of the QE years went into reverse, and the paper prosperity of the 2010s dissolved into real-world insecurity. We’d finally sobered up, woken up, and found our pockets empty.
The Morning After – What We’ve Learnt (and What We Haven’t)
Britain wasn’t alone in drinking the stuff. The US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan all ran versions of QE, and in many ways, they managed it better. The difference lies in how they used the breathing space it bought them. America’s stimulus eventually channelled into its tech and energy revolutions. Europe tied its monetary easing to the green transition and industrial investment. Even Japan, though it never truly escaped deflation, pushed through reforms in corporate governance and productivity.
We used it to buy houses off each other.
What they did was use QE to allow structural change. We used it instead of it. We didn’t just use QE to calm the markets; we built our recovery around it. Instead of treating it as a crutch, we mistook it for a cure. Each new crisis - the crash, Brexit, Covid - brought another round of the same medicine, until the medicine became the disease.
Again, there’s no real evil or malice here. QE itself isn’t malign. It did what it was designed to do: prevent collapse. Unfortunately, we never looked beyond that. We could have created some stability and figured out who we were and what we wanted, but we didn’t.
The Way Out
Unfortunately, the truth is hard and you’re not going to like how it tastes; there’s no shortcut back to genuine prosperity. It won’t come from another tweak to interest rates, and I don’t think it will come from taxing the country into the ground. There are no fancy ideas, there’s no magic bullet. We’re in Occam’s Razor territory here, the simplest explanation is the most likely. It will come from rebuilding the parts of the economy QE let us ignore: skills, productivity, infrastructure, energy security, and the belief that work and ingenuity should count for more than ownership and speculation.
Britain still has extraordinary potential. The same creativity that built the industrial revolution and the welfare state hasn’t vanished; it’s just been numbed by years of easy money and cheap politics. The end of QE’s illusion might finally force us to look up from the false comfort of headline GDP figures and ask what kind of economy we actually want - whether we want that to be built on speculation, property prices and assets most of us don’t have, or one of hard work, shared purpose, and innovation.
At the risk of torturing this metaphor to death, the party is over, the hangover is clearing, and we need to start on our path to recovery.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this essay are entirely my own. They do not represent the opinions or positions of any organisation or project I’m associated with.
This piece reflects personal interpretation and commentary based on publicly available data and reporting from sources such as the ONS, IMF, BoE, the House of Commons Library and others. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy at the time of writing, this should not be taken as financial or investment advice.
Sources
Monetary Policy & QE
Bank of England – Asset Purchase Facility Quarterly Report, Q4 2024: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/asset-purchase-facility/2024/2024-q4
Bank of England – Research Datasets: QE Data and APF Holdings: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/research-datasets
Office for Budget Responsibility – Asset Purchase Facility Flows: https://obr.uk/box/asset-purchase-facility-flows/
UK Debt Management Office – Gilt Market Explained: https://www.dmo.gov.uk/responsibilities/gilt-market/guide-to-gilts/
Bank of England – Monetary Policy Report (May 2023): https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy-report/may-2023
GDP, Growth & Fiscal Context
Office for National Statistics – Gross Domestic Product (GDP): https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp
ONS – Quarterly National Accounts, UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/quarterlynationalaccounts
Office for Budget Responsibility – Economic and Fiscal Outlook (March 2024): https://obr.uk/efo/economic-and-fiscal-outlook-march-2024/
HM Treasury – Budget 2010 (The Age of Austerity): https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/budget-june-2010
Labour Market & Productivity
ONS – Labour Productivity: Output per Hour Worked: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity
ONS – Employment in the UK, October 2025: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/employmentintheuk/october2025
ONS – Average Weekly Earnings in Great Britain, August 2025: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/august2025
Resolution Foundation – The Full Monty: Britain’s Low-Pay Recovery (2016): https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/the-full-monty-britains-low-pay-recovery/
Bank of England – “The UK Productivity Puzzle” (Speech, Andy Haldane, 2017): https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2017/the-uk-productivity-puzzle
Housing, Assets & Inequality
ONS – UK House Price Index, Monthly Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/datasets/ukhousepriceindexmonthlystatistics
HM Land Registry – UK House Price Index Portal: https://landregistry.data.gov.uk/app/ukhpi/
ONS – Wealth and Assets Survey, Great Britain: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/datasets/wealthandassetsurvey
Resolution Foundation – Intergenerational Audit 2023: Wealth and Inequality in Britain: https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/intergenerational-audit-2023/
ONS – Private Rental Market Summary Statistics, England (2024): https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/privaterentalmarketsummarystatistics
Inflation & Post-Covid Economy
ONS – Consumer Price Inflation, UK (2022–2023): https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/consumerpriceinflation
Bank of England – Monetary Policy Summary, November 2022 (on inflation peak): https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy-summary-and-minutes/2022/november-2022
Institute for Fiscal Studies – Inflation, Incomes and Inequality 2022: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/inflation-incomes-and-inequality
International Context
World Bank – GDP (current US$): Switzerland: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CH
Bank of Japan – Quantitative Easing Policy 2001–2006 Overview: https://www.boj.or.jp/en/mopo/outline/qqe.htm
European Central Bank – Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP): https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/pepp/html/index.en.html
US Federal Reserve – QE History and Balance Sheet Data: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm
Reuters – FTSE 100 Closes at Record High for Third Straight Day (Aug 2025): https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/ftse-100-closes-record-high-third-straight-day-focus-jackson-hole-2025-08-21/