Printing money into the economy would normally precipitate inflation. This isn’t happening and won’t happen because the money isn’t going into the economy. It’s going into the banks. The banks are their own world now, they only interface with the wider economy. If they choose not to use this money as a base to create more money into the broader economy then there will be no inflation as the broader economy has no more money in it. They choose instead to address their own internal problems, applying the printed money to their own self-inflicted wounds. The banks played with fire, and burned the world. Handed the first aid kits to multiply and pass around, they prefer to keep them for themselves.
This will continue for as long as the government chooses to hand over newly-printed money to the banks. In their vaults, they don’t have red ink, they have black holes. The securitisation of debt means it was sliced and diced, reackaged, redistributed so many times it will be impossible to either determine who owns what or how much is actually owed. The only realistic way to deal with this, then, is to treat it as infinite. That’s impossible. It couldn’t end. We’d be feeding it printed money foever, and it wouldn’t make a dent. This appears to be the Bank of England’s policy though. Hmmm. I suspect this is because they’re utterly clueless about what to actually do and this disguises that fact by making it look like they’re doing something. Everybody fusses about the potential significance of what they’re doing (inviting inflation) but miss the real significance (they have no solution to the ongoing crisis so they’re stalling). They can keep this up forever, and it looks as though they will, but it won’t solve the problems of the economy (which is that it isn’t designed to work for us in the first place) and it won’t precipitate inflation either.
BB