QE works but not forever, study tells central banks

ZURICH: The benefits of central banks pumping money into the economy by buying securities diminish over time.

That’s the conclusion of a Bank for International Settlements Working Paper by Henning Hesse, Boris Hofmann and James Weber, who compared the effects of the asset purchases in the US and the UK conducted between 2008 and mid-2011 with those thereafter.

While the earlier actions significantly helped the economy, they said, the subsequent ones had little or no impact.

The issue is a topical one for central banks as they work out how to exit the emergency stimulus policies they imposed after the global financial crisis. The European Central Bank has slowed its bond purchases but not yet decided on a definite end-date, while the Federal Reserve is delicately shrinking its balance sheet.

The decreasing impact of quantitative easing (QE) might be because investors increasingly priced in the bond purchases before they were actually announced, the paper suggests.

While QE had “significant” positive effects on real gross domestic product and the consumer price index for the period until June 2011, thereafter the effects were “often not statistically significantly different from zero”.

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, central banks on both sides of the Atlantic started buying securities to contain the fallout. The Fed eventually spent roughly US$3.6 trillion, while to date the Bank of England has spent £435bil (US$580bil) on gilts.

Economists have raised concerns that the programmes, designed to boost inflationary pressures, have had an outsized effect on equity valuations as yield-hungry investors flooded into the market – with potential risks for widening inequality. — Bloomberg