Take a single country, like the UK, why should hard-working folk who save their money be punished? Why should their savings be eroded with inflation and a real interest rate which is negative?
Why should those who were irresponsible, those who borrowed too much or took risky bets be the ones who are protected?
The problem is debt, and the solution is not more debt and reckless money printing.
You are wrong. You have the evidence of the past five years in front of you. The UK and the USA pursued money printing and it has not resulted in any disaster. The eurozone is a hairs breadth away from deflation, much of the eurozone is at or near recession if not outright depression and youth unemployment is high and getting higher.
And this is in a region that suffered nowhere near as badly in the initial financial crisis, it has been brought about by an incompetently created currency area and an idiotic central bank.
Are you forgetting the derivatives which major banks hold? JP Morgan has outstanding derivatives in the trillions. Ask the US comptroller general who reported around $78 Trillion just two years ago.
Even if netted out, if just some of those bets go bad, the bank is insolvent. It does not have the capital base to withstand such an event. Not even if it grabbed all the client bank deposits on hand (like in Cyprus), it is bust.
Ordinary people get stuffed with austerity and savers get stiffed with zero percent interest. Meanwhile banks are given endless overt and covert sleight-of-hand bail-outs.
QE is not designed to save the economy or help workers, it is designed to save the banking system and the insolvent banks within it.
Yes, but savers still do pretty well. QE will save the economy, but not house prices, and not the people who bought multiple leveraged IPs. Savers will still be OK (since the money multiplier will drop there won't be inflation - this can and should be enforced with more prudent bank regulations).
And if deflation hits, savers will be less fucked, but still pretty fucked.
Take a single country, like the UK, why should hard-working folk who save their money be punished? Why should their savings be eroded with inflation and a real interest rate which is negative?
Why should those who were irresponsible, those who borrowed too much or took risky bets be the ones who are protected?
The problem is debt, and the solution is not more debt and reckless money printing.