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Chancellor Admits Mass Money Printing During Lockdown is Behind Inflation

by Will Jones
3 October 2023 6:00 PM

The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has admitted for the first time that the massive money printing in the pandemic – more than in the whole previous decade – contributed to the current sky-high inflation.

Speaking at the Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at Conservative Party Conference this afternoon, Hunt explained that it is the impact of inflation on debt interest payments that means there can be no tax cuts. The Spectator‘s Kate Andrews has more.

As inflation tends to be a monetary phenomenon, it makes sense that quantitative easing had a direct impact on price spirals, and some are willing to point this out.

Former Chief Economist to the Bank Andy Haldane was warning about the effects of money-printing on prices back in June 2021, when the rate of inflation was just starting to rise. Former Bank Governor Mervyn King has been saying since last year that ‘too much money’ contributed to the inflation spiral. Economist Julian Jessop wrote on this topic for Coffee House last month, noting how the annual rate of inflation has roughly followed the growth rate of broad money. Yet it’s been in the interest of both ministers and central bankers to avoid addressing the role of money-printing directly: better for the crisis to be something they’ve been forced to respond to, rather than something they helped to cause.

But this afternoon Jeremy Hunt cautiously added his name to the list. Asked what he thought had contributed most to the inflation crisis – the war in Ukraine, money printing or a wage spiral – he said:

I hate ducking questions. I don’t think it’s quite as straightforward as ranking them one, two, three. I’d definitely put Russia’s war in Ukraine at the top of that list. I think that quantitative easing… I think it is reasonable to say we collectively underestimated the impact of that. Although in fairness to the Bank of England they did start to raise interest rates before everyone else.

Threadneedle Street did move first to raise rates, but once other central banks like the Federal Reserve followed suit, they did so faster and more aggressively than the Bank of England: a move which is now thought to have helped get America’s inflation rate down to almost half that of Britain’s. Indeed one of Hunt’s predecessors – and now boss – Rishi Sunak was well aware of the possibility that QE could trigger an inflation surge: long before Russia’s invasion, Chancellor Sunak was working to protect the U.K.’s finances from the prospect of even a small hike in the rate of inflation back in spring 2021.

Worth reading in full.

Tags: Bank of EnglandCOVID-19InflationJeremy HuntLockdownLockdown costLockdown harmsQuantitative easing

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30 Comments
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NeilofWatford
NeilofWatford
1 year ago

So despite the fact lockdowns killed the economy, old people, small businesses, pubs, education, they were a success.
Who’s going to jail?
Oh, and by the way, we should never have propped up the Ukrainian meat grinder in a war they could never win.
Modern politicians have caused every problem this country now faces.

Last edited 1 year ago by NeilofWatford
208
0
Marcus Aurelius knew
Marcus Aurelius knew
1 year ago
Reply to  NeilofWatford

Politicians (i.e. the sort of people who seek power to execute their crackpot ideas) always cause every problem “their” countries face. It’s just an eternal truth.

55
-1
Paramaniac
Paramaniac
1 year ago
Reply to  NeilofWatford

What i wrote 1 year ago:
If we were to put £20 notes in a suitcase then 1 suitcase would contain about £100,000. So 10 suitcases would be £1,000,000.
Now imagine a (very big) field that contained 500,000 (half a million) of these suitcases.
Now imagine getting all those suitcases and putting them in a big pile, pouring petrol on them and setting them alight.
That’s in effect, what we have done with the taxpayers money spent on Covid in the UK ALONE, a virus that, at worst, is cured by a Lemsip Max.
That is why we, and the rest of the world, now have eye watering inflation.
It’s not rocket science.

79
0
DHJ
DHJ
1 year ago
Reply to  NeilofWatford

The majority of people are having their assets devalued which makes it easier to relieve them of all they own. There’s no problem for the minority that benefit from this and are in a position to influence policy such that it continues.

Jail is for the plebs unless you’re an Ernest Saunders type in which case you can get an incurable disease and then recover from it once released.

28
0
DevonBlueBoy
DevonBlueBoy
1 year ago
Reply to  DHJ

Ah yes, Ernest ‘Deadly’ Saunders. Senior managers in all corporate enterprises climb the career ladder faster than other people of the same age/experience. This means that in their rapid ascent they sometimes tread on the toes of others on the same ladder. The decent ones recognise what they have done and apologise. Deadly was the sort of person who got on to other people’s ladders just to tread on someone’s toes.
More fool the judiciary who believed in his miraculous recovery from a fatal illness and the lies of his doctors who diagnosed his illness and recovery.

7
0
JeremyP99
JeremyP99
1 year ago
Reply to  NeilofWatford

By NOT doing what we elect them to do.

4
0
Sforzesca
Sforzesca
1 year ago

I’m shocked
I never before believed that printing money and paying the laptop class and teachers for doing F. all while they hid behind their sofas could ever have contributed to inflation.

It’s obviously all Putin’s fault – just as he’s responsible fpr the vast increases in energy prices – which started well befor the Ukraine “invason”.

124
-2
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
1 year ago

Something afoot.

I’m not buying this outpouring of faux honesty.

Badenoch telling us Britain is the best place to live if you are black, Barclay threatening to have a word with the NHS nutjobs and now Hunt, a man who couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it, is admitting that printing trillions of pounds might perhaps have caused a touch of rampant inflation.

The con Tories have had 13 years to do right by this country – and most definitely including Brexit – and all they have done is drive us to the brink of collapse. Now however they would like to fess up to some failings and give a promise that they have the best interests of the country at heart.

You know what Fishy and the rest of your traitorous bunch …

You can all F. right off!

146
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

I think what’s afoot is simply positioning themselves just far enough away from Labour that they might stand some chance of getting reelected. But of course they cannot be trusted. Too little, too late. Promises made will be reneged on, as they have been for 13 years as you rightly point out, and measures will not go far enough. Turning down the heat just enough to fool the frogs.

Would life be marginally more tolerable under the Tories than Labour? I think so, yes. But surely sooner or later this has to stop and I think the only way that happens is if Tory voters wake up and realise they have been had. I’m not optimistic.

86
0
DHJ
DHJ
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

The train driver may change and make the journey more or less comfortable or hair-raising but the destination is the same.

33
0
GroundhogDayAgain
GroundhogDayAgain
1 year ago
Reply to  DHJ

…into the buffers

17
0
Myra
Myra
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Do you think people are now crying out for a common sense party?
Or do you think the majority just doesn’t engage with politics?

16
0
Dinger64
Dinger64
1 year ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

Ditto👍

7
0
Jon Smith
Jon Smith
1 year ago

This bloke is beyond disgusting, with his BS animated hand movements, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and if I ever did have the glorious opportunity to throw him it would be into the bottom of a fithly repugnant ditch, exactly where the twat belongs..
Fuck these so called politicians.
How many more decades can they take us for fools with this level of piss take…its truly off the fucking scale.

Last edited 1 year ago by Jon Smith
69
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  Jon Smith

He was one of the worst of the lockdown fanatics. Unrepentant. Never forgive, never forget.

87
0
modularist
modularist
1 year ago

It’s just so inconvenient when you haven’t got the CBDCs in place yet, and you are facing a global debt crisis.

31
0
Roy Everett
Roy Everett
1 year ago

Erm, wasn’t this obvious from the very first letter (from “Boris Johnson”) that the Government sent out to every household in 2020? The letter explained (or perhaps hid) how on average we were all being lent £10,000 to stay at home, hide behind the sofa, rather than work, with the Government making up for lost pay. The implication was that we would repay it in taxes over the next decade or so. I suspect that the figure ballooned, HS2-style, to £20,000, before interest, so it became necessary to print more money than was originally planned.

21
0
Dinger64
Dinger64
1 year ago

“Chancellor Admits Mass Money Printing During Lockdown is Behind Inflation”

Inflation is just the start!

Late this year and early into next year the real consequences will bite! The biggest recession in Western history caused by kicking the can so far down the road over the last 14 years that they thought it would never be found! Well it has! In the gutter by the side of the road, and found a lot earlier than they thought! now the back peddling begins in ernest, fossil fuels, hydrogen fuel cells, vaccines,windmills,space travel, net zero and evs are choices born of luxury and abundance!
when nothing is available, anything is better than nothing!

Last edited 1 year ago by Dinger64
31
-1
Matt Dalby
Matt Dalby
1 year ago

I’m sure that back in 2020 Jeremy C**t was regularly on TV calling for longer harsher lockdowns. Did he give a toss back then about the cost and the long term monetary consequences of printing hundreds of billions of pounds?
Disgusting little hypocrite, I wouldn’t p**s on him if he was on fire.

62
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt Dalby

Yes, plenty of proof all over the shop that he’s a complete tyrannical and duplicitous twat. None of them get to wriggle off the hook and attempt to reverse ferret. He’s on my ‘Head on a spike’ list.

”In February 2021, as his colleague Mark Harper was leading the Covid Recovery Group in demanding the removal of pandemic restrictions, Hunt was insisting that they stay until cases were below 1,000 a day. In October, Hunt welcomed a report by a joint parliamentary committee into Covid on which he sat as one of two chairs. The report itself said that the delay to impose a first lockdown last spring was ‘one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced.’ 
Asked on Good Morning Britain about whether the UK should have locked down sooner he replied: ‘That’s what we conclude in the report, that we should have gone earlier.’ And then, in December that same year, the onetime health minister also voted with the government on ‘Plan B’ and was not one of the 128 MPs who defied Boris Johnson’s ‘vaccine passport’ scheme.
Jeremy Hunt may now argue that he would have done things ‘differently’ as PM during the pandemic. But it’s probably better to judge what he actually did do at the time, given his support for restrictions throughout Covid. Talk about revealed preferences…”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jeremy-hunt-s-lockdown-yarns/

36
0
DevonBlueBoy
DevonBlueBoy
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

Let’s not forget it was Chunt who, when Health Secretary, pushed the findings of Exercise Cygnet in 2016 under the carpet. The findings that said the country was woefully unprepared for a future pandemic.

4
0
DevonBlueBoy
DevonBlueBoy
1 year ago
Reply to  Matt Dalby

Agreed!!

2
0
Myra
Myra
1 year ago

Hunt:”we collectively underestimated the effect of money printing”…
Is this man for real?
I definitely don’t belong to this ‘collective’.

42
0
True Spirit of America Party
True Spirit of America Party
1 year ago

How to wreck the economy in five easy steps:

1) Foment panic over a flu-like virus and shut down the economy for a prolonged period of time, mangling global supply chains and suppressing supply of goods and services.
2) Print unprecedented amounts of money to attempt to paper over the problems caused by step #1. Keep doing so even well after belatedly reopening. Then act shocked!, I tell ya, shocked!, when the persistent supply/demand mismatch ends up causing inflation.
3) Introduce a gene therapy drug so toxic that it kills and/or disables an unprecedented number of people, causing a massive labor shortage when forced upon the masses.
4) Foment a war between one of the worlds largest oil and gas producers on the one side, and one of the world’s largest agricultural powerhouses on the other. Then impose sanctions on the oil and gas producer while propping up the other side. All while banning or restricting domestic drilling and fracking.
5) A month later, start belatedly hiking interest rates, and rapidly so, combined with Quantiative Tightening to suck money out of the economy. Keep rates high long after inflation plummets and act shocked!, I tell ya, shocked!, when that ends up causing a recession (at best).

Then gaslight everyone about it.

(In a Steve Urkel voice) “Did I do that?”

Last edited 1 year ago by True Spirit of America Party
32
0
JayBee
JayBee
1 year ago

Meanwhile, Sweden’s government debt/GDP ratio is lower than before the “pandemic”, aka it has already paid back any extra debt taken on/money printed for that and more.

15
0
A. Contrarian
A. Contrarian
1 year ago

He still hasn’t said it was money printing during lockdown though, he said it was “quantitative easing”. How many people will make the link?

14
0
Mathison
Mathison
1 year ago

The only thing anybody needs to know about Hunt and most of the Conservative party (though thankfully not my MP) was that they voted for mandatory jabs for carehome workers. This is not humane or even human. It what the N@zis did.

As for boom and bust or ‘fleecing the flock’ as the central bankers refer to it, this has been going on for centuries. Covid was merely the next transfer of wealth. After the money makers began to suffocate below their own pyramid laundering scheme, they had to kick the problem down the road £1TN magic money way before the pandemic – and then bring in Covid and lockdown to hide their fraudulent scheme.

We don’t need politicians, the Bank of England (or any private/central banks) or currencies over which we have no control. We the people produce the £2.5TN/year of value. They just steal it. Either they get out of our way, or they’ll be removed.

9
0
JohnnyDollar
JohnnyDollar
1 year ago

Awwwwww….. The Treasury, Banks, Chancellors, MPs, Academia … didn’t know that PRINTING Money causes problems!?? who are they ?? GCSE Students??

The Damn Well Knew . The backpeddaling Weasels. They have destroyed our economy & walking around Free & Richer

8
0
Alan
Alan
1 year ago

And yet the printing presses are still rolling.

7
0
RTSC
RTSC
1 year ago

“WE collectively under-estimated that…..”

No, not WE you Bonus Hole. YOU, the Government and the Bank of England did. And that might be because YOU never carried out a Cost/Benefit analysis before deciding to wreck the economy.

8
0

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