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Saturday, August 25, 2012

UK's QE program benefits go to the rich

Whether it's in the UK or the US or anywhere else, the quantitative easing programs are more about helping the rich - welfare for bankers, you might say - than anything else. There's always talk about benefits for everyone but somehow those benefits never trickle down, do they?
The Bank of England's recent report promotes the idea of spreading the wealth for everyone though it also admits that it primarily benefits the top 10% of the population.

The Independent:
In its report on the effectiveness of its controversial quantitative easing (QE) programme, the Bank said it successfully pushed up share prices and other asset values, delivering an overall boost to the net financial worth of UK households of around £600bn. The Bank said this worked out at an average benefit of around £10,000 per person.

However, financial assets are unevenly distributed around the population, meaning that the benefit was highly unequal. And an analysis by The Independent reveals that the wealthiest 10 per cent of households would have benefited from QE more than 240 times as much as the poorest 10 per cent.

The Bank's researchers suggested that the £325bn of sovereign-bond purchases enacted by the Monetary Policy Committee since March 2009 boosted asset prices across the economy by around 28 per cent. The most recent research on levels of wealth by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in July showed that the wealthiest 10 per cent of British households held £2.5 trillion in pension wealth at the end of 2010, while the poorest 10 per cent held just £2bn.
If governments are going to use tax money to pump up the system, why should most of the benefits go to the select few? Even from a practical perspective, it's wasteful because the rich do not spend extra money but the middle class and poor will spend it.

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