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Richard Harris

The View | Cheap and nasty money is what’s keeping a zombie global economy afloat

We are too used to quantitative easing to give it up easily - but this trickle-down economics obviously has not worked

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Europe and America overflowing with new buildings and cars. Wealth is finally trickling down to the middle-class guy who (when he is not working all the hours he can get to pay his medical bills) is filling restaurants, ordering taxis and buying new phones. Happy days are here again, says Richard Harris. Photo: Reuters

I wish to make an apology.

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In previous columns, readers may have gained the impression the world is awash with cheap and nasty debt generated by central banks in Europe, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States that are flooding the markets with fake, printed money.

I have railed against economists who stubbornly hold onto dying mantras, such as the trickle down of wealth theory, while making up new indicators like inflation targets that cut across their own economic training.

Economics is in turmoil as favoured relationships between unemployment, productivity, growth, wages, inflation and interest rates no longer seem to apply.

Nobel Prizes in Economics are increasingly going to behavioural economists, whose job is to point out that we are all irrational and wrong.

The US is run by Twitter, Europe steered by bureaucrats and the UK by nobody...
All of which provides an ideal vacuum for strong leadership in China and Russia to advance their influence – occasionally through Facebook and Google.
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