Quantitative easing (QE) has been a favourite tool of central banks in their post-financial crisis monetary policy apparatus. Social science literature has interpreted QE as a shift away from performative governance characterising pre-crisis monetary policy. With reference to the Bank of England’s experience, I offer a reinterpretation of QE as a performative intervention in the conditions of financial markets, as an attempt to alter the state of financial markets away from dysfunctionality and towards efficiency. I claim that, following the financial crisis, the model of complete and efficient markets – a mainstay in central banking prior to the crisis – was transformed from a real-world approximation to a ‘performative object’ to be achieved. In deploying the balance sheet, central banks attempt to performatively enact complete and efficient markets. The article rejects the claim of discontinuity between pre-crisis and post-crisis monetary policy, arguing that QE is a continuation of inflation targeting though with important innovations. While pre-crisis performativity relied on central bankers’ communicative framing of market expectations, QE is performative via the ontological shaping of financial markets, driven by epistemic models. The article relies on a set of 51 interviews with central bankers and financial market participants and a corpus of documents.

We provide empirical evidence that the impact of quantitative easing (QE) programs on investment is weaker for countries with high-credit market regulations. We then extend a simple DSGE model with segmented financial markets to include credit regulation and examine its impact on the transmission of conventional and unconventional monetary policies. In our model, the government requires banks to hold a fraction of their assets in government debt. We show that the presence of such regulation can invert monetary transmission under QE policy: An expansionary QE program raises term premiums on corporate bonds and causes a contraction instead of an expansion in the economy. Such a perversion is absent under conventional policy. Further, in contrast to Carlstrom et al. (2017), we show that a simple Taylor rule welfare dominates a term premium peg under financial shocks, while the peg does better in the case of non-financial shocks.

Traditional societies were defined by a prevalence of the past in the definition of the present. United States (US) society seems to show the opposite trend: the present is defined as the preparation of the future. Financial temporality can be seen as an example of the present use of the future, transforming future possibilities into available wealth. As the financial crisis has shown, however, the temporality of the future is more complex and circular. This article deals with quantitative easing (QE) as a financial instrument with an essentially temporal nature (in the sense that it uses time and acts on the future and on expectations). The success of QE in the US economy reveals essential aspects of US temporality, but also raises questions as to how it may differ from European temporality. The analysis of QE measures and their impact also offers ways to assess whether and by which means politics can intervene into finance, as well as what consequences and uncertainties are created in the process.

We study the transmission mechanism of a Green QE, defined as a policy that tilts the central bank’s balance sheet toward green bonds, that is bonds issued by non-polluting firms. We merge a DSGE framework with an environmental model, in which CO2 emissions increase the stock of atmospheric carbon, which in turn decreases total factor productivity. Imperfect substitutability between green and brown bonds is a necessary condition for the effectiveness of Green QE. However, even under this assumption, the effect of Green QE in reducing emissions is negligible and in some cases close to nil.

The power of finance ensured that, other than for an initial fiscal push to salvage financial institutions, monetary measures in the form of quantitative easing, involving the infusion of large volumes of cheap liquidity, were the principal response to the 2008 global financial crisis. The effects of the generalised and prolonged dependence on such measures have been a substantial increase in vulnerability, at the centre of which is a huge build-up of private – especially corporate – debt, and unwarranted and unsustainable asset price inflation in both developed country and ‘emerging economy’ markets. A consequence of these processes is a massive increase in income and wealth inequality across the world, which limits the level of effective demand and growth.

Most emerging economies have been affected to some degree by the Fed’s quantitative easing (QE) policies. This paper assesses the impact of these measures in terms of key macroeconomic variables for four inflation-targeting small open economies in Latin America. We identify a QE policy shock in a structural vector autoregressive with block exogeneity and a mixture of zero and sign restrictions. Overall, we find that these QE policies have significant effects on financial variables such as the exchange rate, and these effects are larger with respect to those in output and prices. Furthermore, the effects vary across countries, and these are more significant in Chile and Mexico than in Peru and Colombia.

This paper argues that the Bank of England's independence in monetary policy has been compromised as a result of quantitative easing (QE) and makes practical suggestions for restoring it as far as possible, by transferring the gilts that the Bank has bought to the Debt Management Office of the Treasury and thereby shrinking the Bank's balance sheet. The paper discusses the problems that will arise when QE is unwound and suggests that they would be less intractable if the unwinding were managed by the Debt Management Office.

This article examines the relationship between Federal Reserve monetary policy and other macroeconomic indicators to both a broad commodity price index and an agricultural commodity price index by employing a vector error correction model. Excessive liquidity and the recent long period of ultralow interest rates appear to have played a statistically significant role in affecting prices in the commodities markets. The responses of commodity prices to monetary policy that we estimate generally conform to earlier findings, but the sensitivity of the responses appears different in the face of the unprecedented scope of recent Fed activism.

Through its quantitative easing programme the Bank of England has looked to manage the supply of nominal UK government securities in order to lower interest rates. In doing so it has removed more than 25 per cent of the overall supply of those securities from the publicly accessible market. The benchmark New Keynesian model suggests this should only have an impact on interest rates insofar as it affects expectations of future policy rates, whilst alternative theoretical frameworks imply a direct effect of changes in supply onto yields. Our aim is to test for the existence of these potential transmission mechanisms. We find empirical evidence to support the existence of both channels. Our analysis suggests the Bank's quantitative easing programme reduced yields by around 25 basis points through the supply channel alone. Importantly, we find that such supply effects have remained significant in recent years, suggesting that as quantitative easing is unwound the increase in publicly available supply will put upward pressure on interest rates. Lastly we highlight the monetary-fiscal interaction inherent in our result and discuss some of the issues it raises for policymakers.

This article outlines some of the intellectual lessons learnt by central bankers during the financial crisis. The key question is whether a broader range of policy options than simple inflation targeting has to be considered in order to limit instability. Interactions with overseas pools of savings, government debt markets and financial risk have all conspired to complicate significantly the task of monetary policymaking. These developments do not mean that the target for inflation has to be modified or dropped but that setting policy will be a more complex task and require more explanation than it has in the recent past.

The financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 and worsened in the autumn of 2008 has involved a repricing of risk and a reduction in the level of potential output in the OECD of between 3 and 5 per cent. In addition it has caused a major recession, leaving output gaps in the UK, the US and the Euro Area currently standing at 3 to 5 per cent of potential GDP despite active policy responses. We show that monetary policy (and especially quantitative easing) has increased output growth in the US and the UK by half a per cent in 2009, and will do the same in 2010Q1. Fiscal policy is also shown to have been effective, but we argue that more could have been done if unfounded worries about excess borrowing had not arisen.