Merv Focuses on quantitative easing

Merv, or Mervyn King to those who don't know him well is the main man at the Bank of England. His job is to make sure that inflation is kept under control, and a bit of financial stability as well.

Here is a lovely picture used by the FT in their article "Bank set to deploy quantitative easing":

[copyright bloomberg.com, 2008]

I like to think that it would have been titled "Merv Focuses on printing money" by The Sun (a tabloid/racy sports/babes/gossip newspaper).

Of course "printing money" is not quantitative easing, but then again we don't have any useful terminology for this complex concept so all the newspapers and TV programs keep using "printing money". For some reason it's better to give it a name that seems simple but is completely wrong, rather than explaining what quantitative easing is.

And a little side note [pun intended] is that the Bank of England does not print money.. they outsourced that ages ago ;-)