Читать книгу Sustainable Futures - Raphael Kaplinsky - Страница 25

Faced with stagnant – and, in some cases, falling – demand, governments in the high-income economies sought to stimulate consumption through the introduction of Quantitative Easing programmes (QE). QE involves governments pumping money into the economy using a variety of instruments to buy securities, such as bonds, from the private sector. It had been pioneered during the Great Depression in the US, but in recent years it was the government of Japan which first resorted to QE. Following a decade of low growth, in 2001 the Japanese government began a programme which pumped liquidity into the economy. As the Global Financial Crisis unfolded after 2008, the Japanese initiative was copied by the US Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. They each injected very large sums into their economies, designed to promote investment and thereby, indirectly, to promote demand. In the US, QE added more than $2 trillion to the money supply. The UK’s QE programme injected £79 billion of liquidity into the economy between 2009 and 2012. The European Central Bank provided €2.5 trillion to Eurozone economies between the beginning of the Financial Crisis and the end of 2018.

The critical feature of these QE monetary-stimulus programmes is that, although they were intended to promote investment in productive assets, in reality, outside of China (where money was directed to promote infrastructure), they were undirected. As a result, the money pumped into the economy was largely used to finance speculation. As we will see below, this speculative boom also led to an increase in consumer borrowings and spiralling debt. Speculation has taken a number of forms. At the relatively trivial end of the speculative spectrum, a Da Vinci painting was sold for $450m in 2017, a Cezanne for $272m in 2011 and a Gauguin for $217m in 2014. But the most significant arena for speculation has been in housing. In the US, house prices doubled between 2000 and 2007. They fell sharply during the 2008 Financial Crisis, but then resumed their upward trend. By 2018, they were 50 per cent greater than they were in 2012, and 70 per cent higher than in 2002. In the UK, residential house prices grew by more than 230 per cent between 2002 and 2018. In Germany, house prices grew by more than 40 per cent between 2011 and 2018. This speculation in property was not confined to the high-income economies. In India, property prices increased by more than 250 per cent between 2011 and 2018. In Shanghai, the price index for second-hand homes grew by 300 per cent between 2004 and 2017.⁴