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Easy Money of Stimulus Made Life Harder for Some

A new Bank of England study shows how quantitative easing, while necessary, widened some inequalities.
Rising real estate prices.

Rising real estate prices.

Photographer: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

The Bank of England has often had to fend off charges that years of easy money worsened inequality. It recently released a study concluding the opposite: that nine years of asset purchases that pumped 375 billion pounds ($527 billion) into a faltering world economy didn't widen inequality after all:

So the BOE is saying here that if you net out the various effects of the period of central bank easing between mainly 2008 and 2014 on different groups, monetary policy had a negligible impact on net wealth. Problem is, if you net out the effects, you miss the real story of QE's impact.