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Blanchflower blames MPC for being ‘feeble’
10.09.09
Former Bank of England member David Blanchflower today warned that the “feeble” monetary policy committee risked making the recession even worse.
He dubbed Governor Mervyn King and two other members of the MPC, David Miles and Tim Besely, the “courageous three” for voting to increase quantitative easing by £75 billion to £200 billion at the August meeting.
He said that the other six members, including deputy governors Charlie Bean and Paul Tucker, were wrong to vote only for £50 billion.
“The biggest problem has been to understand why it was that the other feeble six voted the other way,” Blanchflower wrote in the New Statesman.
“I hope they are right, but I suspect that, as usual, they are not. The danger is that if they are wrong they will simply make the recession worse.
“They missed it on the way down, so why should we trust them on the way up?”
Blanchflower added that “the economy would have been in much better shape today” had the Bank cut interest rates sooner and blamed King for his failure to act.
He said: “Clever as King may be, he missed the crash and the subsequent recession, and hence, so did the consensual MPC on which I sat.”
