LONDON: The Bank of England's 375 billion pounds ($612 billion) of stimulus pumped into Britain's financial system did not boost bank lending, research from the central bank showed on Friday, although it helped turn the economy round in other ways.
The BoE launched its bond buying programme in March 2009 during the nadir of Britain's worst post-war recession, and at the time said it might make banks more willing to lend to companies and households.
New research from the BoE showed that the stimulus programme or quantitative easing (QE) did not produce a new bank lending channel.
"But it is consistent with other studies which show that QE boosted aggregate demand and inflation," the authors wrote.
They said QE was more effective in encouraging banks to offload government bonds and use the cash to buy other, riskier assets instead, like shares in British companies.
The report said this does not prove QE would fail to boost bank lending in other countries.
Still, the research may be of interest to European Central Bank policymakers who have so far failed to coax banks into lending more despite slashing borrowing costs and flooding banks with cheap credit.
That means much is now riding on the ECB's pledge to buy repackaged debt, known as asset-backed securities.
A Reuters poll of economists earlier this month put a 40 percent chance on the ECB beginning its own QE programme of buying euro zone sovereign bonds.
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