Printing money ‘like a heroin fix’

THE Bank of England’s money-printing programme is like economic ‘heroin’ and must be stopped, an expert who helped create the policy said yesterday.

Some £435billion has been spent on so-called quantitative easing, but critics claim it has crushed returns on pension savings and fuelled a borrowing boom by lowering interest rates.

Lord MacPherson, the Treasury’s top civil servant during the financial crisis, tweeted: ‘QE like heroin: need everincreasing fixes to create a high. Meanwhile, negative side effects increase. Time to move on.’