hmmm. I thought I'd be criticised for being left wing but whatever. The alternative is what has been the alternative forever in banking bailouts. Bankrupt the

hmmm. I thought I'd be criticised for being left wing but whatever. The alternative is what has been the alternative forever in banking bailouts. Bankrupt the bad banks, temporarily use fiscal policy and more, actual infrastructure investment by government (job creation) to soften the blow to the economy (not very "right wing" though). You then have a much better clean-sheet kickstart to new investment, letting markets allocate efficiently, as they do. On siphoning. Is it controversial that instead of a continuum of credit pricing set by markets, we have a disjoint between 15-30%+++ on one side, and zero on the other? You have a major actor distorting markets in favour of supporting banks. Is it controversial that the asset side of banks (the target of all the policy) is owned by the wealthy classes, and that therefore they're being favoured? I assume you know that LIBOR is currently around 0.25% and the wealthiest will borrow at only a few basis points above that, whereas the rest of us are lucky if we can borrow at 10x that price with collateral (i.e.: mortgage), and 20-100x that price without. Let me correct you on who is wealthy. People who need interest income are not wealthy. They are middle classes or pensioners. At a long stretch they have a couple million in the bank. They're moderately wealthy at best. Real wealth owns equities, companies and property. That's what's benefitting most from this policy. You soften the blow to moderate holders of debt through government deposit guarantees up to a certain amount. But you do not wholesale buy shitty securities from rubbish banks, at 100c on the dollar. I do not apologize for believing that unfair transfers from the poor to the wealthy are morally wrong. Everyone should have paid their fair share of mistakes in this crisis, whereas not everyone did. Examples. Every emerging markets crisis in the past 50 years has seen large haircuts to debt, hurting the incumbent politicians and corporate bosses to the extent that they are usually replaced. This is what is supposed to happen. That's renewal. Brady restructuring of latam debt 80s. Russia late 1990s. S&Ls in the early 90s. Arguably, the dot-com crisis of the early 2000s followed a similar principle. Remember AOL, Nokia, Worldcom, or Nortel? They're gone, replaced by better companies and products. Boom inevitably followed all the EM restructuring. BTW, there is an excellent argument that Hungary, which was one of the few Comecon countries not to default on its soviet-era debt, was held back hugely by it. Its growth rates in the 90s/2000s was much lower than Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, or indeed, Russia. A nickname may hold more truth than you think! The linked post is just the same tosh we're hearing from central bankers constantly dismissing inequality effects as "uncertain", "unclear", etc. Heli-ben loves low rates hence the nickname. His entire phd is about it. He is clearly not a good potential critic of the policy because his entire legacy depends on it working. oh, and, nice unicode ;)